‘Now, now, no warmongering,’ Mrs Kennedy said.
‘You would be a fool not to know that’s true,’ Madame Quo retorted, ‘and I don’t believe you are a fool, Mrs Kennedy.’
A four-piece jazz orchestra had been setting up in a corner of the room, and the waiters had been clearing tables away in front of the bandstand. The musicians now struck up ‘Begin the Beguine’, a clarinet taking the lead.
‘They’re playing for their passage,’ Commodore Randall said. ‘Refugees, all four of them. Apparently Herr Hitler doesn’t approve of their kind of music.’
Diners abandoned their food to dance. The syrupy melody lines stopped conversation for a while. Couples glided to and fro under the glowering gaze of the great land-animals whose heads were mounted above them.
‘I wonder,’ Miss Ward said brightly, ‘if their bodies are on the other side.’
‘Whose bodies?’ Mrs Kennedy asked.
‘Those bison and moose and things. We should go and have a look.’
‘Your husband,’ Madame Quo went on, ‘has been singing the same song for years, Mrs Kennedy. Peace in our time, and all that. But it’s the wrong song now. The gospel of isolationism is dead. It died in 1917.’
Mrs Kennedy looked at Madame Quo with dislike. ‘You know I can’t comment on American policy,’ she said stiffly.
‘He’s not only out of step with the British government, but with your own State Department. Fawning on Hitler, egging on Neville Chamberlain and all those smart Nazi sympathisers at Cliveden.’
Mrs Kennedy’s lean cheeks were flushed. ‘I don’t intend to sit here and be scolded by you.’
‘You must scold your husband. He can’t go around loudly insisting that Hitler is going to win this war. Nothing could be more distasteful in an American ambassador. And he’s setting himself in direct opposition to your President.’
‘I suppose you know just what our President thinks,’ she snapped.
‘Everyone knows what your President thinks.’
‘Wanting to commit another whole generation of young men to the fire? To save a rotten old house that ought to be pulled down?’
‘I understand that history impels you Irish to consider Great Britain a hated enemy, Mrs Kennedy. But I assure you, you would find the Nazis a great deal worse. They’re rotten too, but in quite a different way.’
‘I’ve had enough.’
‘Your husband is committing political suicide,’ Madame Quo said as Mrs Kennedy rose. ‘He’s going to be sent back to Washington in disgrace if he doesn’t change his tune.’
Stony-faced, Mrs Kennedy swept up her stole and stalked out of the dining room, ignoring the others at the table. Being lectured by that little woman was too much to bear.
She walked along the promenade deck, trying to cool the heat out of her face. There were too many things to bear. Unhappiness and worry weighed on her intolerably.
What to do with Rosemary. Joe’s diplomatic career heading for the rocks, along with the whole damned country. The looming war. The dreadful prospect of the boys enlisting.
Was Madame Quo right? There were others who said the same things. After everything Joe had done for Roosevelt! They had courted Roosevelt for two decades, raising millions for his campaigns, preaching the Roosevelt doctrine, even sending planeloads of live crabs and lobsters to the White House. But as was the way with politicians, Roosevelt would drop Joe in a heartbeat if it was expedient. And Madame Quo had been right in one thing, at least: it was becoming expedient to drop Joe.
She hurried back to her cabin to call her husband.
Cobh
Manhattan sailed into Cobh harbour with a long blast of her horn. The call echoed around the foggy little town, rebounding from the towering bulk of the cathedral, the rows of houses painted yellow and pink and blue, and the terminal buildings that clustered at the water’s edge.
The ship’s passengers crowded at the rails to gawp at the place, remote, pretty and somehow melancholy, perched at the edge of the Atlantic, the last landfall for over three thousand miles.
Unfortunately, the sturdy little tug which was nudging them into their berth was on the windward side of the Manhattan, and as its motors roared, its funnel expelled a cloud of dense black smoke which surged up the high sides of the ship and billowed across the deck, choking the passengers and covering them with soot.
Up on the bridge, Commodore Randall looked at the quaint vista of Cobh, arranged like a nebulous picture postcard around the bay. How many Irish men and women had passed through here on their way to New York, and a new life in a new world? And how many shipwrecked passengers had been brought back here, with nothing more than the drenched clothes on their backs, thanking God for a deliverance from the deep?
Titanic had sailed from here on her maiden voyage, never to be seen again. Lusitania’s handful of survivors had been brought here after the submarine sent her to the bottom in ’15. The Celtic, the Vanguard, so many others, a catalogue of departures and catastrophes.
Cobh had seen all that, lives launched, voyages started and ended; but now the harbour lay quiet. Where usually a dozen great ocean liners were berthed here, this morning the Manhattan was the only one. The war had stopped the British, German and French lines from calling in. They would not return until the war was over. And as for American ones, there were damned few, and all of those were heading for home.
As they approached the dock, the sound of a band could be heard, playing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. The mist drifted clear, revealing the musicians, their uniforms starched, their brass instruments gleaming, pink cheeks distended with musical wind. Behind them, held back by a row of black-uniformed police, was a crowd of some two or three thousand people, waving flags and cheering. And beyond the trumpeting of the band, the forty-nine bells of St Colman’s cathedral could be heard pealing energetically.
‘They must have missed us,’ George Symonds remarked. ‘We’ve berthed here more times than I can remember, but they never rang the bells for us before.’
Randall merely grunted. He was not in a jocular mood. He had received a radio message the day before from the American vice-consul in Cork, Robert Patterson. He knew the diplomat would be waiting to board as soon as they were berthed. He was not looking forward to that particular interview.
And news had reached them of the last American ship to sail from Cobh, the SS Iroquois, captained by his old friend Edgar Chelton, with whom he had served in the last war. It had been a disastrous voyage. Heavily overcrowded, and having endured a three-day storm, the Iroquois had delivered her passengers in poor shape – many with sprains and black eyes from having been rolled out of their cots, and worse, complaining bitterly about the way they had been treated by the captain. There had been insufficient food, they had been jammed in like cattle, the conditions had been insanitary, the crew rude and aggressive.
Ominously, halfway through this unpleasant voyage, Grand Admiral Erich Raeder, the head of the German navy, had warned the United States naval attaché in Berlin that the Iroquois would be ‘torpedoed and sunk, just like the Athenia’.
When this news had been radioed to Captain Chelton, he’d taken immediate precautions. All radio sets on board had been disabled, every nook and cranny of the cabins had been searched, and the passengers had been made to line up one by one in the trunk room to have their baggage searched. That had added panic to an already chaotic situation. Randall was determined not to end his own career on such a low note.
The fog clung to Cobh as Cobh clung to Ireland, tenacious and grey. It skulked in the streets, never lifting, just changing its contours. The passengers on the observation deck were admiring the quaintness of the place and taking photographs. Dr Meese was telling Mrs Dabney and anyone else who would listen that Cobh was pronounced ‘cove’. The British, he said, had tried to rename the place ‘Queenstown’, after Queen Victoria, but the obstinate Irish had patiently outworn that, and reverted to the old name. At least two and a half million Hibernians, he
said, had emigrated to America through this little place. He added, in all modesty, that his own family had come over on the Mayflower, and had settled in Virginia in 1682. No Johnny-come-lately, he.
As they crowded to the shore rails of the ship, Manhattan listed perceptibly to that side. The purser had to use his megaphone to order passengers back from the rail. Their weight was too great for the balance of the ship.
Manhattan docked gingerly in the fog. The gangplank was set up, and the shore crowd surged forward, all but overwhelming the line of nervous young Irish policemen, who had valiantly linked arms to restrain the rush. They managed to push the mob back, but with difficulty. The passengers on the decks fell silent at the sight of this struggle.
The first person on board, as Commodore Randall had anticipated, was Robert Patterson, the American vice-consul, a harassed-looking young man from Ann Arbor, Michigan. Randall met him on the bridge.
‘Boy, am I glad to see you,’ he greeted Randall, wringing the Commodore’s hand fervently. ‘I’ve got six hundred Americans for you.’
‘And I’ve got a hundred places for you,’ Randall replied briefly.
The vice-consul looked aghast. ‘A hundred? What about the rest?’
‘They’re going to have to wait, Mr Patterson.’
‘Wait for what?’
‘Ships are being requisitioned. It’s just a question of time.’
‘My God, they’ll lynch me. Can’t you take more?’
‘I have over seven hundred extra already. And aside from passengers, I’m due to take on twenty extra kitchen staff here.’
The vice-consul reeled. He steadied himself against the compass table. ‘But – but I’ve promised them all a place on Manhattan.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have done that. I can take a hundred and that’s it. I can’t risk overloading my ship. You’ll have to choose a hundred of the most deserving cases. Women and children first is the law of the sea. Able-bodied young men will have to go to the end of the line.’
Patterson rubbed his face as though trying to wake himself from a dream. ‘Where will they go? Most of them are running out of money already.’
A steward had made a large pot of strong coffee for Commodore Randall. He poured the vice-consul a cup and handed it to him. ‘I suggest you make a general appeal to all the hotels and private houses to offer whatever lodgings they can to American refugees, until such time as they can be offered a passage home. You can tell them Uncle Sam will refund them in due course.’
Patterson gulped his coffee, scalding his mouth. ‘It’s not the Irish I’m worried about. It’s the Americans. They’re busting their britches to get home.’
Commodore Randall looked at the tranquil surroundings of Cobh town, with its charming old houses. ‘I don’t think the Nazis are arriving here any time soon,’ he pointed out dryly.
‘You tell them that. They’ve been camped in my office for weeks, screaming about submarines.’
‘They don’t have to worry their heads about submarines.’
‘If the United States gets into this war, they do.’ He gestured at the huge American flags painted on Manhattan’s sides. ‘Those will make a nice, fat target. They want to get home before we find ourselves caught up in it.’
‘How the hell have six hundred Americans ended up here, anyway?’
‘There’s been a rumour going around that US ships aren’t going to travel to Europe any longer – that Cobh is going to be where they turn around from now on.’
‘That’s not true.’
‘It’s what everyone believes. So they all came here to be sure of getting a ship.’
Randall sighed. ‘Whatever the case, I can’t take more than a hundred. And we’ve been delayed enough already. I want to sail in two days. You need to go out to that crowd and explain things.’
Though Commodore Randall had not encouraged any of his passengers to go ashore in Cobh, Mrs Dabney and a party of others could not resist the lure of the charming old town. With their cameras at the ready, they climbed the steep streets up to the gigantic edifice of St Colman’s cathedral, which dominated the harbour, encrusted with every neo-Gothic embellishment that its Victorian architect could think of. From here (the fog having started to clear) they were able to admire the azure bay spread out below them, dotted with green islands, and watch the inquisitive sailboats which were nosing in from all quarters of County Cork to inspect the proud bulk of their own Manhattan.
Nor did their progress through the town go unremarked. Shopkeepers emerged from little corner shops to lavish charm upon them, along with unbeatable offers of woollens, tweeds, whiskies and original, guaranteed authentic souvenirs from the Titanic. Their dollars were readily exchanged for these good things. The only disagreeable incident arose when an American couple with a little boy in tow accosted them, demanding not very politely that they intercede with the hard-hearted Commodore Randall to allow them a passage home.
Escaping from this importunate family, they made their way back down to the docks, there to admire the painted fishing boats in the harbour, and the elaborate wrought-iron bandstand in the Boggy Road. A local hostelry, advertising a pie and Guinness lunch for five shillings, caught their attention, and they went in, with appetites sharpened by their shore excursion.
Back on the Manhattan, Commodore Randall was not having such a relaxing morning. Far from pacifying the large group of Americans hoping for a passage home, the vice-consul had returned with a vociferous delegation of some twenty men and women, determined to do battle with the skipper. The group was too large to entertain on the bridge, so they adjourned to the First Class smoking room.
‘We’re not taking no for an answer, sir.’ The spokesman of the group was a loud, fat man named Reverend Ezekiel Perkins, the spiritual director of something called The Nordic Tabernacle, who had been leading a party to Rome to confront the Antichrist in the Vatican, when war had broken out. Randall took an immediate dislike to the man, but heard him out. ‘We have heard that this ship is carrying many hundreds of aliens. Non-Americans, sir, not to put too fine a point on it. Our question to you is, why are we to be excluded from travelling on a United States ship, when foreign nationals are welcomed aboard?’
‘The answer is simply that they have tickets, and you don’t.’ At the back of the group he saw Dr Meese, and thought he knew who had given the delegation their information, and encouraged this mission.
The Reverend Perkins’ face darkened. ‘We have tried in vain to buy tickets, sir. We have queued with our dollars in our hands at the ticket office here in Cobh, and have been told that we cannot get places on the Manhattan for love nor money.’
‘We’re already well over capacity.’
‘We are Americans. We are Christians, sir. We demand to be treated as such.’
‘As I told Mr Patterson here, I’m able to take a hundred extra passengers—’
Far from pleasing the deputation, this caused an uproar which prevented the Commodore from finishing.
‘A hundred places are of no use to us,’ the Reverend Perkins said stridently, his voice rising with practised ease over the others. ‘There are over six hundred of us! How do you suggest we choose who should leave and who should remain?’
‘As I said to Mr Patterson, women and children should have priority—’
‘That is inhuman, sir. Are you proposing to tear Christian American families apart in this time of crisis?’
‘I have offered you a solution, and you must take it, or wait for the next United States vessel to call in at Cobh.’
‘And when will that be?’ a woman called.
‘Within the week, assuredly.’
‘If anyone is to wait in Cobh, it should be the foreigners you have on board,’ Perkins declared. There was noisy agreement from the others. ‘You should put them off the ship immediately, and give their places to us. Let the aliens wait for the next ship – if it comes.’
‘I have never done such a thing in all my career,’ Randall s
aid shortly. ‘And I don’t intend to start now.’
‘They do not have the rights of American citizens, sir. Their welfare should not come before ours.’
‘Don’t browbeat me, Mr Perkins,’ the Commodore growled. ‘I have room for a hundred, and no more. And I will be sailing tomorrow, so make up your minds quickly.’ He rose from his chair, adjusting the sleeves of his jacket, on which were the unbroken gold bars of his rank. ‘I bid you good day.’
The Manhattan’s post office had taken delivery of a mailbag from the postmaster in Cobh. The letters, from all over Europe, were distributed to the passengers by the bellboy. There was one for Rachel Morgenstern, a pale mauve oblong covered in stamps and stickers. It had been forwarded from Le Havre to Southampton, and from there to Ireland.
‘It’s from Dorothea,’ Rachel said. She tore it open swiftly, and the colour drained from her face as she read.
‘What does she say?’ Masha asked anxiously.
‘She was arrested by the Gestapo.’
Masha’s hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh no.’
‘She was caught when they raided a club we used to go to. It was a harmless place, just somewhere we could meet without being pestered by Romeos.’ Rachel’s voice was dead. ‘She was interrogated for three days. They released her when her health broke down, but she’s still under suspicion, and waiting to hear what they will do next.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
Rachel read on. ‘She’s been sacked from the academy. She has no money. She doesn’t know how she will survive. She can’t pay the rent. Rationing is in force now, there’s little food in the shops, and the winter is coming.’
‘What will she do?’
‘The only relations she has are her sister’s family in the country, but they haven’t spoken to her for years because of what she is.’ Rachel lowered the letter, her face bleak. ‘She says she will get married.’
The Ocean Liner Page 19