The Midnight Watch (11 page)

‘But he was asleep below. You were on the bridge. You saw them. What did you think they were?’

‘I called down to the captain about them.’

‘And what did he say?’

‘He told me to watch her.’

‘Anything else?’

‘To Morse her.’

‘So you watched her and Morsed her.’

‘Yes. That’s what I did.’

‘Then that’s what you write.’

Groves spoke as if he were stating a simple solution to a simple problem, but his face had darkened. His eyes disappeared into the shadow of his cap as he leaned forward and his lips were drawn tight between his teeth. He turned away, and Stone sensed exasperation – disgust, even. He suspected Groves was thinking that if he, Groves, had seen the rockets, he would have done more than watch and Morse. Stone had seen him leap into the water from a pier without a moment’s thought to rescue a woman’s parasol; he would think even less about waking the wireless operator in the middle of the night, or hauling the captain up to the bridge. ‘People expect to get woken up on ships,’ Groves had once told him. And each night, Stone knew, Groves woke Evans on his way down from his watch just to get the gossip.

The standby quartermaster sounded the first bell of the watch. But still the third officer lingered. He seemed to be building up to something. When at last he spoke, he was tentative and thoughtful.

‘We all have to live with this, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one with this thing on his mind.’

‘But you have nothing to trouble yourself with.’

‘That’s not so. I could have saved everyone.’

Stone looked at him in astonished silence.

‘I was in the wireless room,’ Groves continued. ‘I had the head-phones on. If I’d wound up the detector I would have heard her. She was calling for help by then. Sparks told me this morning that the detector had wound down.’ He paused, hanging his head. ‘Sparks has shown me before how to wind it. I knew how. I just didn’t notice.’

Stone stared hard at him. For Groves there was a straightforward causation: if he had thought to wind up the machinery, he could have saved everyone. But the moral quality of that omission, Stone knew as he nervously clutched his notebook and searched his friend’s face for sympathy, was very different from that of his own. Groves had had no hint at all that anything was wrong, but he, Stone, had seen the rockets.

When Groves at last left the bridge, Stone stood alone beneath the great canopy of the sky. There were no longer any men on the foredeck. The derrick booms were stowed, the decks were secured, life on the
Californian
had recovered its ordinary rhythm. He leaned against the forward bridge rail, rested his notebook on the steel ledge and began to write.

*   *   *

There was fire in the makeup of donkeyman Ernest Gill. His father was a blacksmith’s assistant, and as a child Ernie had played among the glowing forges of Sheffield as freely as other children might play among trees and meadows. He knew from the very beginning that his would be a tough life – every day his father told him so, and said, too, that with all these fires about they would never be far from hell. Ernie was fascinated by the red-hot iron and leaned as close as he dared when his father beat and shaped it with a hammer. ‘You see,’ his father used to say, ‘apply enough heat and anything will bend.’

Ernie liked school. He had ideas, and when he spoke he found that other boys would gather to listen. A teacher taught him the Rule of Three, beginning with Caesar’s
Veni, vidi, vici
, which he used in varying forms whenever he could. His mother, a hard little stone of a woman who beat her husband with pebbly fists whenever he drank too much, claimed Ernie was destined for better things than the Sheffield forges, and helped him with his studies as best she could. But she died when he was eleven years old and he left school to earn what money he could. As an adolescent he worked for a glassblower, stoking the furnaces and cleaning away the ash. One day he picked up a flask that he thought had cooled but which in fact was white-hot. His skin sizzled and came away. When his hand finally heeled it was disfigured with unsightly lumps and scars, and never again could he fully open it.

When his father died Ernie moved to Liverpool and got work in the engine rooms of ships. He was a trimmer and then a fireman, shovelling coal into boilers to keep up the steam. He was quick with his devil’s claw and slice-bar to rid the fires of ash and clinkers, and he had the hottest, cleanest burn of any fireman. By the time he signed on to the
Californian
he was ready for promotion. He was twenty-seven years old, newly engaged to a girl in Liverpool, and tired of shovelling coal. When, on his third voyage, he was made assistant donkeyman he put on a clean boilersuit to work closely with the gentlemanly engineers and had nothing more to do with coal.

His new position, and the whiteness of his overalls, gave him a sense that, in his own humble way at least, he had become something of a leader of men. Which was why, early in the afternoon following the sinking of the
Titanic
, he called a special meeting in the focsle. He had seen something very strange during the night, he said, and something needed to be done about it.

The focsle was a private place: it could not be seen from the bridge, and anyone approaching from the ’tween decks could be heard in advance opening and closing bulkhead doors. Gill sat on an upturned crate in an area between the forward stores and the men’s bunks, where half-casks and cotton-filled sacks lay about. The men drifted in one by one: the ordinary seamen and able-bodied seamen, the trimmers and firemen, the carpenter and the bosun’s mate. They talked among themselves rather than to Gill, but he didn’t care. They would listen to him soon enough. His news would shock them all.

He sat tracing the lumps and scars of his right hand with the little finger of his left. The men spoke of the seals they had seen lazing on the iceberg, of the terrible news delivered by the
Carpathia
’s flags, of the futile search for bodies. Some said these must have been drawn down by the suction, others said they had been swept away by currents. Every sailor had become an expert, but they didn’t know what he knew.

‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said when everyone was there, and looked around to see if his words had taken hold. They hadn’t. The men continued their talk as if they had not heard him, so he stood up and stepped onto his upturned crate. ‘We are a ship of shame,’ he said again. ‘We saw her rockets and did not go.’

The men looked at him and fell silent. One word had cut through.

‘Rockets?’ asked a trimmer.

‘Rockets,’ Gill repeated. ‘Distress rockets.’

‘Claptrap,’ said a seaman.

‘It’s true. I saw them myself. I went on deck for a smoke after my watch, and that’s when I saw them. The second officer couldn’t help but see them too. And I know he
did
see them because the apprentice told Sparks that he did, and Sparks told me.’

The men stared at him.

‘The skipper was called but he didn’t come up. He just lay there and grumped and chewed the second out about it. And that’s why I’ve called this meeting. It isn’t right that a man should refuse a ship that calls for help. It isn’t right, and something ought to be done about it.’

Gill watched the men closely. Coughin’ Kenny spluttered into his cotton wadding, which he held up to the light so the men could see the raspberry-red clots glistening with black dots of coaldust. Brennan, the bosun’s mate, surly and sour, mumbled something inaudible. But Fat Ballantyne asked Gill to go on.

‘And that’s why we didn’t find any bodies,’ he continued. ‘The skipper didn’t
want
to find any. He didn’t want to be dragging up corpses of people he was too lazy to save when they were living.’

Gill felt a small artery pulsing in his temple and the scar on his hand throbbed. He sensed the power of his words; he saw now that every man was listening. He was triumphant, like a preacher who has just revealed a profound truth of scripture. The men began to ask questions – what the rockets looked like, what colour they were, how far away they seemed. Fat Ballantyne, heaving himself up on his matchstick-thin legs, asked why the captain, when called, did not go up to the bridge.

‘I don’t know,’ said Gill. ‘He just didn’t, and it isn’t right. It brings shame to the ship – it brings shame to us all.’ It was time, he sensed, for the Rule of Three. ‘He was called, he did nothing, and now it’s up to us.’ He paused for effect. ‘I vote we form a Committee of Protest to go to the captain – a Special Delegation – to go up and tell him that he isn’t going to get away with it.’ A few men nodded and there were some positive mutterings. He could see they were ready to follow him.

But McGregor, the carpenter, sitting on a small wooden stool, lifted his head and said in a low, measured voice, ‘Go up to the captain and lose us all our jobs, you mean.’

Gill had never before heard the carpenter speak a word: McGregor was man who kept to himself, took his soundings and did his woodwork. When he stood he was as tall as Gill was standing on his crate, and his skin was such a deep brown that Gill wondered whether he was an Englishman at all. And now, having found his voice, the carpenter didn’t stop. ‘The focsle shouldn’t be talking so against the captain,’ he went on, speaking without seeming to move his lips. ‘Nothing good will come of it.’ He fixed his eyes on each man and rested them finally on Gill. ‘That’s what’s making this ship shameful –
your
calling this meeting,
your
complaining and chattering. It’s mutiny talk – that’s what it is, pure and simple. If we were back in sail, you’d be hanging from the yardarm like washing in the breeze.’

‘Well, we’re not in sail,’ said Gill. ‘And a
protest
isn’t a
mutiny
.’

‘It is with this skipper. Say one word against him and he’ll have you off articles quicker than you can cry poor. And he might just clap you in irons in the meantime – you and any poor man you talk into coming with you in your Committee of Delegation, or whatever you call it.’

‘I’m not scared of the captain.’ Gill flung these words out to all the men, but the carpenter blocked them.

‘And he isn’t scared of you. He’s tougher than you are. You go up against him, you’ll come off second best. Trust me, I’ve known him for years.’ The carpenter stepped closer, tall and sinewy and strong. Gill could see the topsails of a tattooed tea clipper showing above the low collar of his shirt. ‘I don’t believe you saw any rockets,’ the carpenter went on. ‘Our skipper wouldn’t ignore a call for help at sea. No man would. I don’t know what kind of talk goes on down in the engine room but we don’t talk against our ship up here on deck. As I say, if anyone brings shame to this ship it’ll be you. So the best you can do is get down off of that rickety crate and stop spouting your nonsense.’

‘It isn’t nonsense,’ said Gill, stiffening and clenching his scarred hand into a fist. ‘And you’ve got no jurisdiction over me. I’m engine room, is what I am. Engine room!’

‘Listen to you –
delegation
,
jurisdiction
. Pah!’ The carpenter spat on the deck. ‘Those are mighty fine words for an orphan boy from Sheffield.’

At that moment, the aft door opened and the bosun stepped into the space. No one had heard him coming. The men were at once a blur of movement: standing, doing up their shirt buttons, taking off their cloth caps and holding them by their side. The bosun was kind, but he was tough and unyielding too. His eyes moved slowly from man to man and then settled on Gill.

‘Everything under control here, Mr McGregor?’ the bosun asked of the carpenter while looking at Gill.

‘Always under control, Mr Bosun,’ the carpenter said, turning away and stepping towards his bunk. ‘The fireman’s helping me with my vocabulary, that’s all.’

‘Assistant donkeyman!’ spat out Gill, as much to the bosun as to the carpenter. And then, apologetically, ‘I mean, I’m not a fireman any more…’

‘Well,’ said the bosun, ‘fireman, donkeyman or candlestick maker, you’d better help open this place up a little – it stinks in here.’

Gill stood down from his crate. He knew he had lost the men. As they pulled on their boots and sou’westers and threw open the forward hatch to let in light and air, they did not look at him. None of them would form a committee with him, or come with him to protest to the captain, or help him right the great wrong that had been done. The carpenter had seen to that.

*   *   *

Herbert Stone often marvelled at the bewitching resonance of his captain’s voice. When Lord told of rounding the Horn five times in sail, of meeting Mr Shackleton, of landing a thousand men on the beaches during military manoeuvres, he spoke as an indulgent grandfather might to a loved child. He used words like ‘poppycock’ and ‘balderdash’, and seemed always to speak from a position of special knowledge. He even pronounced the name of the
Titanic
in his own particular way, with a strange elongation of the second syllable –
Ti
-tar-
nic
.

So when Lord insisted that it could not have been the
Titanic
’s rockets that Stone saw during his watch, Stone felt compelled to believe him. ‘I did not see the
Titanic
,’ Stone said to himself. But he was having trouble writing it. The
Titanic
was large, stationary, and had fired rockets, so he knew his letter must say that what he saw was small, moving, and showing signals that were not rockets. He had set these things out clearly enough – ‘I judged her to be a small tramp steamer – steaming away to the S.W. I observed a flash of light in the sky’ – but then he began to lose his way. He became uncertain. He pressed his pencil hard into the page to make his words dark and bold, but when he read them aloud they seemed timid and ambiguous. He persevered for a day, and then another, and as the ship neared Boston he at last had a draft ready for the captain.

Captain Lord was talking quietly with the chief officer over Thursday luncheon in the dining saloon when Stone drew up a chair and handed him the letter. Stone thought he would read it at once, but instead he carefully folded the two sheets in half and put them in his pocket. He spoke of the weather, of the warming sea temperature, of the possibility of fog ahead. He asked Stone what he thought of these matters and nodded thoughtfully at the answers. The thick velvet curtains swayed with the gentle roll of the ship and the polished silver cutlery rattled softly on the tables. The ship’s engine throbbed steadily.