The Midnight Watch (36 page)

‘I said she was disappearing in the southwest, just like you said. Then he said, “Very well,” and we are to let him know if anything is wanted.’

‘If anything is wanted,’ Stone repeats slowly. ‘So he’s not coming up?’

‘No.’

Stone, left alone with his thoughts and his decisions, turns slowly to the steamer once again. Her lights – the queer, glowing, changing lights – dim further.

In London, Mr Butler Aspinall, KC tries one last time to understand. ‘What did you think, at the time, the rockets meant?’

Stone stares straight ahead, keeping his body still. ‘I knew they were signals of some sort.’

‘I know that – of course – they are signals. But signals
of what sort
, did you think?’

‘I did not know at the time,’ Stone says.

Aspinall feels as if he is clutching at mist. There is something strange about this witness. He seems able to suspend his own thinking, like an animal that can stop its breathing when it senses danger.

Even the Commissioner seems unnerved by the vacuum of Stone’s answers. ‘Now, do try to be frank!’ he implores.

‘I am,’ Stone says.

‘If you try, you will succeed. What did you think these rockets were going up at intervals of three or four minutes for?’

‘I just took them as white rockets, and informed the captain and left him to judge.’

The ladies in the gallery look on in fascinated horror. They put aside their opera glasses. What they see is plain enough to the naked eye: a man who reported the rockets to his captain but who now desperately wishes he had done more. Herbert Stone is sorry. They can see it in his anguished eyes now welling with tears, in his clutching of the flimsy rail of the witness stand. Let him go, they think. He is a good man. He has been tortured enough.

But the Commissioner, a man who has built his career on judging, deciding and thinking, does not let him go. He is appalled by the blind faith the witness has in his captain, as pitiful and absolute as the trust an infant son might have in his father. ‘You mean to say,’ Lord Mersey says, his hands resting in clenched fists before him on his great desk, ‘that you did not think for yourself?’

Stone is silent.

‘You know, you do not make a good impression upon me at present,’ Lord Mersey tells him.

Aspinall tries to help the witness. ‘You know they were not being sent up for fun, were they?’

‘No.’

‘Did you think that they were distress signals?’

‘No.’

But for Stone on his freezing bridge, in the depths of night, whether the steamer has been sending up her rockets for fun, or distress, or some other reason, matters no longer, for at twenty past two, her lights disappear altogether.

Stone walks to the rear bulkhead, picks up the speaking tube and blows into its mouthpiece. Moments later he hears the captain’s weary voice.

‘What is it?’

‘The ship firing the rockets has disappeared, bearing southwest by west.’

Stone can hear the captain breathing at the other end of the tube.

‘There was no colour in them?’

‘No, Captain, they were all white rockets. All white.’

‘Very well. Put it in the log.’

Stone hears the stopper being replaced in the tube. He takes the scrap log from its small cupboard and writes an entry in it by the light of the compass binnacle. He describes the rockets and notes the times he whistled down to Captain Lord, and the time he sent down the apprentice. He has informed the master, as was his duty. Now the troublesome steamer has gone, and there is peace at last on the bridge of the
Californian
.

*   *   *

When Stella feels the deck beneath her feet rise suddenly she almost falls, but steadies herself. A low groan comes from deep in the ship and the deck lights glow red. Ahead of her the seawater has reached the forward end of the boat deck. It creeps along, swirling in menacing currents around the feet of desperate men trying to right an upturned boat. One of them kicks at the water as if it were a dog biting his heels. Another, standing nearby in a splendid military uniform, shouts at people in an American accent and waves a gun at a poor cowering boy with dark skin. But it’s all in vain: the boat floats uselessly upside down in the deepening water. Stella can see no other lifeboats.

A man in evening dress is trying to lash himself to a wooden door. Another ties steamer chairs together to form a raft, but the chairs keep sliding away from him. A woman has strapped her lifejacket around her waist rather than placing it over her shoulders, and it looks like an outlandish girdle. She’s struggling to carry two children – a baby in a sling and a sleeping toddler propped over one shoulder. She cries out for help but no one comes.

Stella would like to go to her aid, but she must think of her own family. If Doug and Fred could hunt about for chairs, or anything made of wood, perhaps they could lash together a raft big enough to hold them all.

But it’s so difficult to stand up. The deck is too steep to walk any further aft. Stella keeps her balance by leaning against the wall of a small deckhouse. Her father is squatting on his haunches to bring his face level with little Tom’s. She can hear him talking of the ship that is coming to take them all to Jacksonville, but Tom doesn’t care any more. His eyelids droop with exhaustion and he holds his blanket to his face. He’s had enough of the adventure now, he wants to go to bed.

Will has run off again. Her mother is calling out for him, but there’s nothing that can be done. The water is only a few feet away.

Doug chases three dogs that have come loping along. The animals are skittish and nervous. Stella is grateful that someone has at least thought to free them from their kennels. When Doug tries to loop a rope through their collars she asks why. ‘So they won’t be alone,’ he says.

Fred comes to her and once again takes her hand. He doesn’t say a word, but squeezes her hand in nervous little pulses. Dolly comes to her too, crying and saying she’s scared of drowning.

‘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.