The Wild Dark Flowers (32 page)

“He’s still the Minister,” Octavia retorted. Her impatience was getting the better of her. Smythe was no doubt being kind, but all she truly cared about was seeing Harry as quickly as possible. “I shall show the letter nevertheless.”

“As you wish, of course,” he replied.

They walked quickly. It was now almost nine o’clock and the sunlight was incredibly bright as they neared the docks. They came to a sad-looking bench seat at the bottom of a set of allotment gardens. “Would you sit here, just for a moment?” Smythe asked. “I shall go and ask around. No use you trailing through the crowds.”

“I certainly shall not.”

Smythe’s face took on a pleading expression. “If you could just take a breath for a few moments,” he said. “I can dodge about down there so much quicker. His lordship I’m sure would be horrified—quite rightly—if I had subjected you to trailing over the whole harborside.”

And he was gone in the next second. Octavia seethed quietly for a while. She felt impotent, hampered by her own femininity. Even men whom she did not know assumed that she was not up to the fray of normal life. One might think she were made of paper, able to be torn by the anxious elbowing of a crowd.

She fought down a very severe desire to wrench off her ridiculously expensive velvet hat and her prettily silk-stenciled coat. She ought to roll up her sleeves, metaphorically at least; it was almost embarrassing to arrive in a less-than-workmanlike costume. If Smythe thought her fragile, then it was hardly his fault. She looked down at herself. Velvet . . . silk . . . how could she have been so frivolous, so thoughtless? Rapidly she took off the gloves and pushed them into her handbag. Smythe was only reacting to the picture she projected of herself.

She could almost feel William’s admonishments ringing in her ears: traveling alone, getting into strange cars with men of a lower class; sitting alone, in some narrow uneven walkway, on a bench with a broken seat. “Great heaven’s sake, Octavia!” It was almost as if he were there at her side.

Well
,
she thought.
What of it?
Much worse was happening all around. She thought of the sixty-five thousand refugees that the woman had talked of that morning. Good people among them, doubtless people of a certain distinction, people who had owned property and land. They had not been allowed to stand on their dignity; they had fled for their very lives.

War was a great leveler, the destroyer of societies. She wondered how she would ever manage, ever again, to sit at the head of their own dinner table and discuss inconsequential subjects. How would she ever be able to look into the faces of men like Harrison or Nash again, and tell them to wait upon her? And what on earth was she meant to do with her life, to be of use, instead of a mere embellishment?

“I am an anachronism,” she murmured, out loud. And, with the sun blazing down on her in the ragged little alley, she realized with a crushing certainty that it was true. They were outdated, she and William. They were out of place and time, and merely bystanders at this great world-breaking war. They sat in their houses and let their sons talk of glory and fun, and watched them being brought home as casualties. Across in France, the British and Austro-Hungarian relics crashed together. They called themselves empires, but they were mammoths of another age.

She thought of William lying in his room in the Grosvenor Square house, pale against the pillows, the very picture of a fading class. She stared sightlessly over the tidily kept gardens beyond the fence at her side. Working people. The woman on the train last night, sitting on the floor, had been possessed of a dogged courage, enduring her discomfort. The look she had given Octavia was one of indifference, almost defiance.
We are dinosaurs
, Octavia thought,
we can’t rely on the way things used to be.
And her heart flew out in absolute pity for her husband.

At the same time, at the back of her misgivings and her worry over Harry, John Gould was at the very edge of her mind: standing there in the wings of the theater of her life. He would have arrived in Liverpool two days ago at least; she had not had a moment to contact him. If he had arrived at Rutherford, or telephoned there, he would have found no one home.

She passed a hand over her forehead distractedly. She knew John’s impetuosity: he would have gone straight to Yorkshire, and if he had then been told that she and William were in London, she knew he would come there. He would at least be in a hotel in the city, if not actually at the Grosvenor Square house. Had he spoken to William already? Her heart turned over; William’s health would not bear Gould’s appearance.

She realized that she had no idea at all what she would do when she saw John again. “Perhaps I should avoid it altogether,” she murmured to herself. John and William and Harry . . . she felt that she was at the center of an unraveling drama. It was she who must get Harry back to London. It was she who must ensure William’s well-being. It was she who . . . she paused, and gazed around herself.

The threads of her life were all in her hands. If she dropped a single one . . . she must be blameless. She
ought
to be blameless. She had a duty to her husband and son. She had a duty of care to her daughters. And yet . . . and yet . . . the house on Cape Cod, on the bleached and grassy-duned bay, with its lanterns around the deep verandah. She could see it all as John had described it. “Oh my God,” she whispered. “I must tell him to leave.” If she saw him, all the delicately held threads would disintegrate. And yet, at the periphery of her mind, the lanterns on the deep porch flickered.

Interminable minutes slipped away. Eventually, she got to her feet. She straightened her back and took a deep breath. She tried to see what ships were coming into harbor, but it was futile; they were too far away. “Oh, this is ridiculous,” she muttered. “It won’t do. It simply won’t.”

She scooped up her bag and started down the path.

She had not gone twenty yards before Smythe appeared again, quite out of breath. “It’s in,” he told her. “Docked forty minutes ago. Bedlam down there. I’m not sure you’ll want to see . . . some of the cases . . .”

“Nonsense. Please let’s hurry.”

“They know who you are. The harbormaster had a call from his lordship.” He smiled broadly. “They can’t quite believe you’ve come alone.” He offered her his arm. “And there’s a motor ambulance. Yours, apparently. But you’ll have to talk to the doctor about that one, I’m afraid. It appears they’ve got your boy booked to go to Liverpool on the next train.”

Octavia’s expression made it quite obvious what she thought of this news. “I shall be more than glad to speak to the doctor,” she said firmly.

*   *   *

I
n the house in Grosvenor Square, William and Charlotte sat in the drawing room with the newspapers, at last delivered by an apologetic vendor, spread out on the table in front of them.

Charlotte was gazing at the front page of the
Daily Chronicle
. There was a banner headline across the very top—“
Lusitania
Survivors’ Terrible Stories”—and, beneath that, column after column of print: “Last Scenes of
Lusitania,
”
“Full Story of Great Murder,” “1,400 innocent Lives Sacrificed,” “Tragic Scenes at Queenstown.” Overshadowing them all was a large drawing of what looked like an ancient prince all in armor, waving a sword marked “Vengeance.”

She laid her finger on this and looked up at her father. “More blood, more dying,” she said. “They’ll use this to recruit more men, and bring America into the war.”

William looked at this very perceptive daughter of his, and could do no more than nod. He had been reading as much as he could since he had heard the news, and he had kept his thoughts private. U-boats had been the subject of many a conversation just before war had broken out: he had heard both Churchill and Grey talk of them.

He knew very little of Admiralty policy now, and certainly not the inner workings of that department, but something was making him uneasy. He knew that a U-boat captain, to score a successful hit, needed to be square on to a vessel. He knew that the vessel had to be sailing at a speed considerably less than the
Lusitania
was capable of in order to be able to make a strike at all. And he knew that to score three direct hits in rapid order was very near impossible.

He glanced at Charlotte’s newspaper. “
Lusitania
Struck by Three Torpedoes,” and his heart made that peculiar little tripping dance that he had experienced so often over the last few days. He waited for it to assert its normal rhythm, and then turned back to his own broadsheet.

“How can a ship that size sink in just a few minutes?” Charlotte was asking him. “The
Titanic
took a couple of hours, surely?”

“The
Titanic
was not hit by explosives,” William replied.

“It says here that she rolled over to one side, and lifeboats just fell into the water, or crashed along the deck.” She paused. “Someone called Charles Lauriat was on a rescue ship, and when it got to Queenstown, the captain wouldn’t let the survivors off. Lauriat put the gangplank over the side himself. . . . Oh dear,” she suddenly murmured. “There were babies just floating in the water; there’s a bosun here of an Irish lifeboat saying that the corpses were ‘as thick as grass’. . . .”

“Don’t read any more,” William said. “It will only upset you.”

Charlotte gave her father a withering look. “Darling papa,” she murmured, and read on, occasionally exclaiming with another fact. “The quartermaster of the
Lusitania
was in the water for hours, and saw half a dozen steamers go past him. . . .”

William read that Charles Lauriat and others had struggled to get a collapsible lifeboat to float properly, telling the screaming people in the water to let go the sides just for a few seconds so that the rails to which the canvas was attached could be raised. The tackle for opening up the seats inside had been rusted and broken, and the oars had gone. In astonishment for the man’s courage, William read that Lauriat had dived into the sea to find oars. The collapsible had eventually picked up so many survivors that it lay almost flush with the water, with still more people begging to be let aboard.

“Good God,” William murmured.

The stories of the women desperately trying to save or find their children were by far the worst. His eyes ran over the accounts: of someone called Charlotte Pye who had fallen from a lifeboat, clutching her daughter, and lost hold of her child as she was dragged under twice; of another who had lost three children, all killed by the cold of the water as she had struggled to keep them afloat. A father who had held his son until the boy died, and then sank under the water himself.

William read that the water temperature had been only eleven degrees; there were endless stories of passengers losing their grip on the pathetic pieces of wreckage that they had found. Such extraordinary things washed up from the ship—dog kennels and hen coops, part of a piano, chairs and tin cans and oars. Grimly, he read of those who had survived by holding on to corpses, and, almost more horrifying still, of those who had drowned because their lifebelts had been put on wrongly—bodies floating upside down because the belt was the wrong way up, or floating facedown because the belt was on back to front.

A woman called Alice Middleton told how the American millionaire Vanderbilt had helped her and many others, telling his servant to find children, and put lifebelts on them, and get them to lifeboats. But no one knew where Vanderbilt was now; he had not been in a rescue boat, and his body had not been found. It was said that the flags of the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York were flying at half-mast and that Vanderbilt’s solicitor had offered a thousand pounds for the recovery of Vanderbilt’s body. They evidently did not expect him to have survived.

The grim task of recovering the dead had gone on through every hour of the day and night. Hundreds of corpses were being fished out of the sea, and taken from lonely beaches and the mudflats of Courtmacsherry Bay. The desperate survivors were brought in alongside the dead, and they had come ashore at Queenstown wrapped in clothes that the crew of fishing boats had given them; dripping, pale, injured in every way. They had been sent to hospitals, and hotels and boarding houses; those who could walk had been told to go to the Cunard offices and register their names on a list of survivors.

Americans had complained that the banks would not give them money; many were wandering the streets, dazed, hardly knowing their own names, white with shock. The Queenstown post office on the waterfront had been open all day and all night so that telegrams could be sent; a post office official reported that he had found one woman shaking too violently to make out a message, and that she kept murmuring that “my brother . . . my mother . . .” as the pencil slipped from her hand.

There were bizarre moments recorded, too: of a man called Roberts, for instance, now lying in a mortuary with his cap still on his head, looking quite composed in death. The man’s wife had not been found, though the newspaper seemed to suggest that the woman and Roberts had not actually been married, but were fleeing lovers. And some writer or other of whom William had never heard—but who was reputed to have sold forty million copies of an article—whom one American survivor was reported to have seen trying to climb a cylindrical drum that kept turning over and over in the water. He was now missing. Here, too—a woman called Theodate Pope, thrown with a pile of the dead on a rescue boat, had suddenly revived, asking for her companion, of whom there was no trace.

And then. The captain of the ship, Turner, trying—incredulous, William read on—to buy a hat in a Queenstown outfitters, looking “broken down,” if the reporter was to be believed. “Broken down and his uniform shrunk too small.” Further down, the article noted:
In the same shop window, a notice had been posted as follows:
“Missing: a baby girl, 15 months old, very fair curly hair and rosy complexion. . . .”

William put the newspaper aside.

Where was John Gould? he wondered. And where was Octavia, at this very moment? He imagined her in Folkestone. She must have seen a newspaper by now. She must know; she must be absolutely consumed by the horror of it all. And yet she had not telephoned him. What was going through her mind, at this very second? What was she feeling in the heart she so successfully disguised from him these days? He almost dared not think about it.