by David Dyer
‘Don’t be silly,’ Stella says, ‘you can’t drown with a lifejacket on.’
Connie is holding onto Dolly’s dress with both hands and will not let go, even when Dolly tries to push her away, but George, smoking a cigarette, picks Connie up and tells her there’s nothing to worry about.
Stella can still see the lights of the ship in the distance and thinks there might yet be a way through; if they can all stay together in the water, it must surely come to them eventually. They can keep each other warm with their bodies in the meantime. Yes, she thinks, there might yet be a way through.
Now the ship lurches and the water runs up along the deck towards them. It all happens more quickly than Stella expects, but also more gently. The sea surges and gurgles about her legs, then her waist, then lifts her delicately away from the deck altogether. Yards quickly open up between her and the ship. Her lifejacket keeps her floating high in the water; she does not even get her hair wet.
She looks around for her family but just then the cold comes to her, all at once and without mercy. She has no thoughts, just the sensation that she is burning. She tries to cry out but can make no sound. She cannot draw in enough air. She stutters and gasps and feels her body burst into spasms of shivering.
Now she sees her father in the water. He is nearby, reaching instinctively upwards, as if by clutching at handfuls of air he might somehow drag himself out of the ocean. George, too, is near and she sees some of the others. She at last finds her voice. ‘Keep together!’ she cries. ‘You bigger children make a ring, with the little ones inside. Make a ring. Hold onto each other.’
There are grinding, roaring sounds behind her and people are screaming. She does not turn around to look but searches instead for the rest of her siblings. Her father, she sees, has little Tom, and her mother is pushing Connie towards them with the backs of her hands. ‘In the middle,’ says Stella, ‘yes, that’s it – it’s warmer there. The little ones inside.’ George and Fred and Doug are trying to grasp the arms of their sisters, but the girls are drifting away. Dolly holds her hands up to the sky, as if trying to warm them against the distant stars. Ada has dropped into the water the orange given her by Will and is trying to pick it up again.
But where is Will? Her mother is near her now, calling his name. Stella calls out for him too, but there’s no answer. The ship has gone altogether and there is an engulfing darkness.
The children have almost formed a ring but now it falls apart completely. In this bitterly cold water their little hands cannot hold on. They are drifting away. Her father is crying out, ‘Please help us, we have children here!’ But Stella knows that no one will come. There are hundreds of people in this black water. She can hear their cries and groans flying unheeded to heaven.
Connie drifts near and asks her if she may close her eyes while she waits.
‘No,’ says Stella. ‘You must not close your eyes.’ But her voice is a thin whisper and Connie can’t have heard, because her eyes are now closed. Ada has closed hers too, and Dolly, and Doug. She gives up trying to stop them. The children float high in their lifejackets and the water is calm; it won’t splash into their mouths as they sleep. And the water is not, after all, so very cold. She realises she has stopped shivering.
Fred and George are splashing about, trying to do something with rope and a deck chair, but they soon give up. They too close their eyes and rest.
The children’s faces are lit by starlight. They look like sleeping angels. Wisps of mist lie on the water and gather about their necks in scarves of gossamer. Stella still cannot see Will. Perhaps someone has reached down and pulled him into a lifeboat. In this silvery light people will have looked at him in the water and seen that he is not a man, as the officer with the gun had said, but just a little boy, with a face more beautiful than any on earth and eyes that shimmer like a dragonfly’s wings in summer. They will have pulled him aboard and women with feathers in their hats and fur round their necks will have covered him with blankets and blessed his white cheeks with kisses.
Here’s little Tom now, floating next to her. His eyes are wide open, staring straight ahead into the mystery of things. With the back of a gentle finger Stella slides his eyelids shut and leans forward to kiss him. ‘Goodnight,’ she says, ‘my dear little brother.’
The reddish-white light of the mystery ship is hanging steady beneath the North Star. All our exploding rockets, she thinks, and it never did come. But there’s no point waiting any more.
She turns away from the cold light in the north, and from her sleeping family, and begins swimming south towards Jacksonville, where the water will be warmer. This is a journey she must make alone.
Stella can feel the powerful stride of her arms and already she begins to feel warm – quite, quite warm.
EPILOGUE
The Titanic gradually disappeared from the newspapers. The Great War came, and then the Second World War, and the industrial slaughter of so many people seemed to erase the public memory of all that had gone before. The loss of fifteen hundred in one night hardly seemed to matter any more. People forgot about the disaster altogether, or otherwise knew of it only vaguely.
I made a mediocre living doing what I did best: searching out the truth and giving voice to the dead. I discovered cruelty and recklessness in army generals and wrote biographies of men vaporised during bombing missions. After the war I put aside my typewriter and surprised myself by turning seventy. I had always thought growing old was something other people did.
My daughter, meanwhile, flourished. In 1920 she voted in her first Massachusetts election, and celebrated by hosting a party in which she and her female friends wore men’s evening suits and held cigars in their mouths. They had joined the enfranchised at last, my daughter said in a short speech, but they still had a long way to go. A year or so later she married a military man, but she promised me he was no Archibald Butt. He’d never once shot a craven and never would. I grew to like him very much. When he died of cancer after the war, Harriet said, as simply as if she were stating a mathematical truth, that she would never marry again. She had no children, and when she invited me to share her bright and airy house in South Boston, I agreed. The move made Olive and Vivienne angry at first, but in time they grew used to the idea and would visit on Sundays to drink sherry and play cards.
My manuscript about the Californian affair languished in a bottom drawer. But then, one freezing January morning in 1959, when I was eighty-three years old, Harriet took me to see a new British film about the Titanic disaster. The cinema was crowded, and there were gasps and cries as the ship reared before us on an enormous screen. The Californian was shown stopped nearby in the icefield, with Captain Lord sleeping below and Stone and Gibson on the bridge above. I laughed a little: Stone was portrayed as a self-assured officer of perhaps forty years of age – nothing like the baby-faced, timid man in his early twenties I had met. Lord was shown asleep in his cabin bunk in his pyjamas, rather than fully clothed on the chartroom settee; he was overweight and in his fifties, not a lean and bronzed 34-year-old.
But the movie, inaccurate though it was, brought back memories, and later, at home, I took from my drawer my manuscript. ‘Do you think,’ I asked my daughter, ‘that you might seek to have this published after I’m gone, to set the record straight?’
‘Gladly, Papa,’ she said. Harriet knew something of the book business, having worked at Beacon Press for a short time after the war.
‘But it’s not quite finished.’
‘No, it’s not.’
‘Do you think, after all this time, he might agree to see me?’
‘If you ask him nicely,’ she said, sliding closer to me on the couch and leaning her head against mine, ‘I don’t see why not.’
* * *
What is it about some women that makes them age so well? Why did I know as soon as I saw Mrs Stone that she’d been able to float above those earthly things that had dragged the rest of us down? She reminded me of a seabird carried aloft
by air currents rather than by the flapping of wings; she had the sort of strength men never have. We become such ponderous, sullen things, we men, but Mrs Stone was light – oh, so light.
It was a misty afternoon in late November in that same year of 1959 when she welcomed Harriet and me to her home in Bootle. It was a smaller house than that in which I’d seen her almost fifty years earlier, but it was all she could afford, she said, so there was no use complaining. She had raised three children since we last met, two sons and a daughter, who were now raising children of their own.
We sat in the front parlour and spoke of jet travel, television, supermarkets and Sputnik. Mrs Stone made us tea, and when the afternoon light began to fade she turned on a small electric radiator. In its soft orange glow the three of us looked almost young again. For a while no one spoke, and in our little cocoon of warmth time seemed to slow.
‘We were so very sorry,’ Harriet said at last, ‘to hear about your husband.’
‘Thank you,’ Mrs Stone replied. ‘Herbert was the gentlest of men. I miss him very much.’
He had died, she said, quite suddenly, during his usual morning walk to work. A brain haemorrhage. He had been a storeman at the nearby docks, still able to lift heavy boxes even at the age of seventy-two. He stayed at sea for more than twenty years after the Titanic but he was never very happy. He never got his own command. He went missing once, from his ship in London, and was eventually found sitting alone on a pier in Devon. He didn’t return to sea again after that. ‘He much preferred his work in the warehouse,’ she said. ‘He loved it.’
I wondered what it had been like for him – all those years in that warehouse to think and remember. And I wondered what it had been like for this gracious woman who sat before me with pretty flowers pinned to her blouse. I felt sorry for her: when Harriet and I took our leave she would again be alone in this house. I was grateful for my splendid, devoted daughter, with me always, more important than air.
‘Why are you here?’ Mrs Stone asked softly, and I recalled that once her husband had asked me the very same thing.
‘I’m on my way to see Stanley Lord,’ I said, ‘and it would hardly have been polite not to call in on you, would it?’ I waited a little, smiled, then added, ‘And you never did tell me what you thought of my story – of the eight rockets.’
‘Didn’t I?’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Well, I thought it was very sad.’
Again we fell to silence. A wireless crackled softly in an adjacent room, and I could hear someone picking out a tune on a neighbour’s piano. Children laughed in the far distance. Mrs Stone seemed to be listening for something specific in these sounds, angling her head one way and then the other, but I could not tell what.
‘Did Mr Lord,’ she asked, closing her eyes in thought, ‘ever tell you what he thought of your story?’
‘I doubt he would have bought a copy.’
‘My husband sent him one.’
‘Then I doubt he would have read it.’
Mrs Stone seemed to ponder this carefully. Then, without speaking, she rose and left the room. I wondered whether we had been dismissed, but a moment later she returned with a thin brown envelope. ‘If you’re going to see Mr Lord,’ she said, ‘then please do give him this.’ She took from the envelope a small sheet of yellowed paper on which words had been scrawled in pencil.
I knew at once what it was, even though so many years had passed. My memory clarified, like images resolving on photographic paper: the Californian’s bridge; a small, unlocked cupboard; the ship’s scrap log; the stubs of torn-out pages, one stub showing that a particular page had been cut out with meticulous care.
Mrs Stone handed me that page now as reverently as if it were a sacred parchment, and in the soft light I read Herbert Stone’s tentative, pencilled words. ‘One Bell: Ship – southwest – fired white rocket. Four more rockets – Informed Master by speaking tube. Two Bells: Morsed ship as per captain’s orders. Two more rockets. Strange glare of light. Three Bells: One more rocket. Eight in total. Informed Master by apprentice. Five Bells: Ship disappeared in southwest. Informed Master by speaking tube.’ The words were faded and smudged, yet they were enough to drag that little piece of history through time and space to appear vividly before me once again.
‘Your husband cut this page out?’ I asked.
‘No. Not my husband.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Mr Stewart did. Do you remember him? The chief officer. A strange man. He sent this page just before the war, to return it to its rightful owner.’ Mrs Stone paused, then added, ‘He cut it out to protect the captain, you see.’
I did see. The words ‘Informed Master’ appeared three times on the page. In this whole sorry business, those two words were for Herbert Stone the most important of all.
‘Herbert wrote to Mr Lord many times over the years,’ Mrs Stone said. ‘He pleaded with him. As I say, he even sent him a copy of your story. But he never heard back.’
As I looked around the room, the years seemed to blend away and make vivid my sadness. There were framed photographs of Herbert on the walls – with his children, with his grandchildren – but images came to me of him facing the men of the Boston press in the cramped chartroom of his ship. He had been fearful then, a trapped animal, and his eyes had looked to me for help. I’d given him my card and asked him to talk to me, but I should have done more.
‘Make sure he reads it,’ Mrs Stone said with a new firmness. ‘Make him read that page and make him understand: my husband called him, and he should have gone up. It’s simple, really. If he can accept that, then at last, at long, long last, this thing will be over.’
I gave my promise: I would deliver to Lord the scrap log page and I would make him read it. And perhaps I would get from him, finally, an admission.
Shortly afterwards Harriet and I took our seats in a taxi. As we drove away I looked back and glimpsed Mrs Stone standing in her doorway, framed by golden light as if already in heaven.
That night, in our Liverpool hotel room, with Harriet mixing gin cocktails, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs Stone had told us. I had a vision of Herbert writing letter after letter to Lord and never getting a reply. I imagined the pencils, the erasers, the discarded drafts, and wondered what words he’d used. I wondered what I would have written, had I been Herbert Stone writing to Stanley Lord.
From somewhere deep in my memory came the words of one of my countrymen, which I had learned by rote as a schoolboy. ‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done … O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills…’
* * *
‘Hello, hello! I am pleased that you have come,’ said Stanley Lord when he opened his door to Harriet and me two days later. The old captain’s home – a two-storey, pebble-stone terrace house with large bay windows – was only half a mile or so north of the house he’d lived in when I last saw him.
‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ I said. ‘This is my daughter, Harriet.’
Lord gave a low bow. He was now very thin, with sunken pits at his temples and cloudy white spots in his eyes. I was not sure how well he could see us. But even in the infirmity of old age there was something tough and unyielding about this man: the sags and folds of his face seemed only to emphasise the strong, hard bone of his skull underneath.
He led us into a warm, open living room with a large armchair, two couches and a gramophone. Small stained-glass panels glowed behind the lace curtains of the bay window; vases of flowers sat on its sill.
A puffy man of about fifty stood nervously by the window. He closed his hands into little fists, which he held beneath his chin, and smiled at me through lips drawn tight around two prominent front teeth. I knew at once who he was. He had his father’s baldness, and had pulled strands across his head and smoothed them down with hair cream.
Lord introduced the man as Tutty, his only child. ‘He is named Tutton,’ Lord said, �
��my wife’s maiden name.’ He spoke in slow, measured sentences, as if his son’s presence required a special explanation. Mrs Lord died two years earlier, Lord told us, but Tutty had never married and still lived at home, and so was able to care for him just as capably as his wife had. Nor had Tutty gone to the war; he would not have lasted long abroad, Lord said. It was much better that he stay put at home, where he could look after the garden and listen to opera on the gramophone.
‘Do you like the opera?’ Lord asked me.
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I don’t much care for it.’
‘Neither do I,’ Lord replied with a chuckle, ‘but Tutty does, don’t you Tutty?’
Tutty said nothing, but hung up our hats and coats and led his father by the arm to the large chair. Harriet and I sat on one of the couches, Tutty went to make tea. Here, too, the walls around us bore framed photographs: Lord in full captain’s uniform on the bridge of a ship; Lord with his wife and Tutty on a beach promenade; Lord, Tutty and another man in a touring car.
I was a retired Harvard professor, Lord believed from the letter I’d sent him, researching a history of the nitrate trade, and by the time Tutty returned with the tea, Lord was speaking expansively about his years as a commander in the Nitrate Producers’ Steamship Company. He told us of the ships, the ports, the officers he’d sailed with. It was a special breed of men, he said, who worked in the trade: proud Englishmen with courage and initiative. He showed us a polished silver frame containing a reference from his employer. ‘We regard him as one of the most capable Commanders we have ever had,’ it read.
Harriet was charming. She listened, she praised, she asked questions. I marvelled at her storytelling. It was a perfect blend of fact and fiction; her transitions were so seamless that even I became confused. In one moment she joked about Harvard being located in a suburb called Cambridge, in another she awarded me the Beacon Hill Prize for Historical Writing. By her openness she encouraged Lord to be open; by her flattery she made his aged skin flush pink. She was an elixir, and he was young again. He spoke of the first war, when he’d almost sunk a German submarine, and of how he had become an expert in transporting horses. He sent Tutty out to find for us letters of commendation from the governments of America, France, and other places.