Titanic Ashes (3 page)

It had long been his habit to open mail, even bills and
business post, at breakfast on weekdays. In one of those
quiet and meaningless struggles between husband and
wife, Mother had always objected and Father had always
persisted regardless. This morning had been no different.

“Bruce, please!” Mother protested as Jenny, the maid,
disappeared red-faced after delivering the tray.

“Just a minute, ” Father had replied, slitting the first
envelope, scooping out a bill, then doing the same to a
small invitation-sized letter. On seeing the signature first
Father had given a brief “ha!” and a playful glance around
the table before he read. Only when he rose slowly, letting
his napkin fall, did it occur to Evelyn that anything was
wrong. He lifted his chair so it wouldn’t scrape, turned,
and silently left the room.

Mother, Margaret, and Evelyn crowded around the
note. George was shooed away. A
tut-tut
from Mother
sank slowly into a gloomy, furious silence from all three of
them. If Miranda had appeared again before them, Evelyn
would gladly have pulled the blue ribbons around the
girl’s neck and strangled her.

THE FEELING
,
SO FEROCIOUS
at the time, eventually fizzled away into an understanding of its own futil
ity, leaving acrid grime against the inside of Evelyn’s
memory. There had been nothing to feed it. Lurid and
damning editorials from across the Atlantic were swallowed up by more urgent news of the war. In reality
Miranda Grimsden’s note had been merely a tiny bell ringing the same tune that had clanged mercilessly from other
quarters. It had been the unexpected nature of the attack
that had made her the focus for Evelyn. She was a little
girl. She had been in the house playing with young
George’s train set. She already dwelt within the soft
underbelly of the Ismay home and the stab had been all
the more startling. Father had been like a wounded lion,
gentle but in his prime respected and revered. Now he
was wounded and some beastly little carrion bird—the
smallest of the jungle—chirped and mocked at his misfortune.

Only a vague and smoldering sense of loss remained,
loss of years traditionally full of joys, gossips, and adventures. Seeing Miranda Grimsden in adult form—her snub
nose elongated, her chubby face slimmed into angles and
cheekbones—has confirmed her status as a nonentity.

But something sparks afresh, the realization that a
nine- or ten-year-old child does not create her biting
invective in a vacuum, and that during those intervening
years Evelyn would have been better reserving her fury
for the proud, small-eyed woman and the barely verbal
man who had parented her. The idea is a revelation. A
child is a child. Her younger self might have been liberated by the notion had it occurred through the fog of
anger and confusion. But now it shackles her more
securely than before. Seeing Miranda Grimsden grown
up, and ill at ease with her parents, gives context to an
almost forgotten tormentor. For the first time she thinks
about the accusation as something more than random,
more than the misdirected twitch of indignation in an
embryonic mind. It was altogether more directed, she
realizes, more fuelled; and it absolutely demanded
redress.

She wonders for a moment if her father has seen them,
whether this is the reason he has been edgy and remote
since they sat down to dinner. A quick glance at him,
catching a genuine tinge of pleasure in his slightly watering eye as he too listens to the band, makes her realize he
could not have. He was never an actor and could not have
feigned pleasure while tormentors from his past were so
imperfectly shielded from his view.

A moment ago she wanted to reach out and lay her
hand upon his as he tapped his fingers upon the table. But
that would have given away the fact there was something
to worry about. Instead she contented herself with looking until the feeling would make him turn to her, then
once this was accomplished, infusing her smile with all
the fondness she had for him. He caught her expression,
and the sheen of sentiment in his eye was gratitude and
warmth, for children and wife, perhaps, and for the home
which could not quite be torn asunder by disaster, misfortune and all the accumulated blame of a population in
shock and searching for a villain.

EVELYN
’
S ATTENTION IS ALMOST
unbearable.
One’s own child’s expectations are so much worse than
one’s own conscience, he thinks. She wants so much more
from him than he wants for himself, and the discomfort of
it is rather like that of a long-dead corpse urged back to
life against the will of the departed soul. She craves
justice, self-respect; she wants him not to give in. And he
is so profoundly tired of it all.

Thank God she doesn’t appear to have seen them. The
chance of a meeting with the Grimsdens, even an accidental locking of eyes, or shuffling sideways of a seat as one
of them passes, is horrendous. It would tip the evening
into confusion, cause the most brittle of silences to rise
between him and his daughter. It would invade their
home, no doubt residing there for months in anxious
glances in his direction and whispered enquiries about his
health.

And with Evelyn one never knows. For him a taboo is
a mute object that quivers unacknowledged through its
own quiet torments. He isn’t sure he can trust Evelyn not
to make an open battle of it. And it would be so futile.
They would be fighting over a mere reputation, who said
what to whom about conduct and honour, and whether it
was deserved.

All evening, above the dense murmur of conversation
in the Palm Room, a sharper sound has invaded his ears,
knife against plate, ice on glass, the occasional shriek of
faraway laughter. It was he who chose this place for a
quiet dinner, and now he wonders whether it might have
been a sort of self-punishment, unconsciously imposed. So
many people have been doing battle for years over the
wreckage of his soul, why should he not prod the heap
himself for a change?

It has never ceased to amaze him that the question of
his own conduct brings forth more emotion than the
multitude of pointless deaths. It’s enough to make a man
quite conceited, this idea that his own survival, what he
may or may not have said to the captain about the speed
of the ship, is worth so much column space when fifteen
hundred people died so terribly.

The band has paused between songs, but it is only
when Evelyn’s rather sentimental expression turns curious, then worried, that he realizes that he is still tapping
his fingers on the table even though there is no music.
He’s been caught; it’s difficult to imagine a more certain
proof that his joviality up to this moment has been
feigned.

When the band recommences, it’s a rather slow, classically styled piece. He recognizes the fragments of melody
as an arrangement of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune, ” an odd,
rather sombre, choice and not one he would have
approved of in the dining room of one of his liners. But
musicians can’t resist contrast, nor, if the management is
too slack, can they stop themselves from attempting to
educate an audience.

The talking becomes louder and a little restless in
response to the change.

Ismay gives his daughter a shy smile and turns his seat
back toward the table. Evelyn holds his gaze for a
moment, perhaps deciding whether to chide him for being
absent. The path of this conversation has been so well
trodden by his wife, Julia, that his daughters and even his
sons know it by heart. It starts with a question, often innocently put, something like “Penny for your thoughts?” or
“What is your mind so intent upon that you should stare
so?” It’s a trap, of course, albeit a benign one, and he has
never quite reconciled himself to the futility of trying to
escape it. He usually pretends he was thinking about
something quite unrelated to work—a holiday in the past
perhaps, an old acquaintance he hasn’t seen for many
years. Only the most elaborate of storytellers can get away
with such subterfuge, and he, being no such creature,
merely becomes evasive, then short-tempered. No one
comes out and says it, but silence and a knowing nod
confirm the belief that he must have been thinking about
some aspect of business present or past. At this point he
feels like a criminal.

But tonight is worse. It isn’t any normal aspect of work
that bothers him. It’s
the
night; the one he suspects might
be waiting to engulf him once more on the other side of
death. He can feel the water lapping gently against the
wooden lifeboat shell, he can feel the swell in tune with
Debussy, and he can taste the ice crystals on his mouth.
What a disadvantage the medieval painters were at when
they tried to depict a communal hell. Fire, and brimstone,
and cavernous depths will terrify only a portion of the
immortal soul; real damnation is more carefully moulded
to an individual’s experience. His own vision of torment is
simple enough: a lifeboat rocking gently upon an ocean;
cold; an awareness of people huddled on all sides, a
cough here and there, a few words; the idle splash of oar
upon the water’s surface; a sense that it could not have
happened, that the event this group has lived through is
too catastrophic, too unbelievable to explain itself to the
day, and that time will oblige itself to roll back the hours
and restore them all to the
Titanic
, where news of a near
miss with an iceberg will bring an enthralling end to a
Sunday evening, and the Marconi telegraph operators will
fill up the tingling night air with the passengers’ tales of
romance and adventure.

Before he saw the Grimsdens tonight, he already felt
he was on the deck of the great liner slicing through black
waters. The gentlest of inclines tilted the soles of his shoes
slowly one way, then another, as he and Evelyn stepped
from the foyer into the Palm Room. Likely he is on board
the
Titanic
every night, he realizes, but seeing the
Grimsdens has made him more aware of it than usual.

The wine waiter adds a decorous half inch to Evelyn’s
glass and refills Ismay’s while the soup bowls are removed
and the entrées placed before them, hare for father,
pheasant for daughter, its singed flesh puckered where the
broadest feathers have recently been plucked. Evelyn
smiles across the table, letting the expected question drop.
Ismay returns the look and raises his eyebrows as though
in relish for the feast.

Before drifting from the table, a waiter refills both
water glasses. Two wisps of memory now sparkle like
floating ice needles, and Ismay realizes both have been
present for weeks, tingeing his dreams, and following
from a distance during the day. The first recollection is
from a memorial service. The hollow sounds of closing
hymn books, creaking pews, and suppressed coughs flood
over him again. He’s at the lectern, reading the lesson, a
letter from Saint Paul to the Corinthians about the nature
of steadfastness and suffering. As he glances up into the
dimmed congregation, he seems to catch something—a
faint ironic smile. The impression is too fleeting, too
vague for him to be sure it is even real. He looks down
again and tries to refocus on the lines, fingers twitching
aside the scarlet ribbon; he realizes he can’t tell whether
the face belonged to man or woman, youth or elder. He
stumbles a little before finding the spot, not so markedly
that anyone would notice. But it unnerves him, the sense
of distrusting his own senses. He has been the subject of
enough gossip, the object of enough sniggers to shrug
judgment aside while a job is to be done. He is used to
enemies, and used to soldiering on regardless. But this is
different. He feels that if he looks up again, he might see
the smirk once more yet still be unable to pinpoint the
direction from which it comes.

The Great War has been over less than a year and this
service is for marines lost in the conflict. Ismay has made
a very large donation to set up a fund in their memory,
much of the money going to their families. For the first
time since 1912 he has begun to feel the lifeboat controversy is being overshadowed by something of more practical and immediate importance. He can feel the energy
around him change; the murmur that has been following
him for seven years is softer, the consonants less hard
edged; the eyes that meet his do so with a degree of
acceptance, the spark of judgment dying. He is transcending the past, he feels, because the donation is so apt. The
people lost are seafaring people,
his
people, quite literally
in many cases; personnel from his former ships swelled
the ranks of the merchant marines after war broke out.
The smirk—or his suspicion of it—disquiets him more
than he would have thought possible. It threatens even
the concept of atonement.

Yet, he reminds himself at the lectern, the money is
real, and the sentiment is real. The donation represents
not only himself but family, in-laws, partners, staff,
investors, anyone who had ever benefited by mercantile
trade and now owes a debt of gratitude. Even if he were
to believe the worst said about him, why, he wonders,
would his sin subvert an act of such uprightness on behalf
of so many?

The second memory is odder and hardly connected at
all. It’s a party somewhere in New York. He doesn’t
remember the venue or the host, only the grumble of
voices and the angular movements. Clumps of men in
evening dress shake hands, gesticulate, tell wild stories to
each other and guffaw, before returning to mixed
company and behaving quite differently with unexpected
poise and formality.

Someone, a lanky fellow, speaks close to Ismay’s ear.
His voice is sharp, high-pitched, rapid, and Ismay doesn’t
catch the words. He’s aware too late of a white thin-boned
hand hovering before him like some exotic flower, and
then it disappears. He realizes the man was trying to
introduce himself, and half thinks of following and
tapping him on the back to make amends for his own
slowness, but it is too late; the lanky fellow has joined one
of the groups of men, and they receive him enthusiastically with simultaneous yells and two or three
outstretched hands.

“Careful, Ismay, there’s a guy you don’t want to
offend.” The warning comes from a shipping-agent friend,
and is delivered as a joke, or so it seems at the time,
although the tone is low, smilingly ominous.

“Who is he?” Ismay asks.

“Hearst, William Randolph. He owns the
San Francisco
Examiner
and has just bought
The New York Journal
.”

This part of America, despite the propaganda, is stiffer
than England, its rules more defined. A man does not
meet another man without a handshake and there is no
acceptable substitute. The slowness of modesty holds no
excuse. Ismay shrugs, knowing it’s too late, and supposing
the man has already forgotten the unintentional rebuff.

HE STILL SUPPOSES IT
now, more than three and
a half decades on, as he slices through the brown leg of
his hare. After all, that one near-meeting was all that ever
happened between them. But like a scattering of stones
before a comet hits the earth, the memory in retrospect
seems to hold the power of a portent—mystical and
strange and utterly disconnected from any real possibility
of cause and effect. What a small world, or extraordinary
coincidence, or both, that it should have been that very
same lanky fellow with the staccato voice and the hovering hand whose newspapers would carry such damning
indictments of his own actions, in prose so florid and
fantastic he might have enjoyed the sensation of reading
if only the subject were not himself. He re-imagines
Hearst’s narrow, youthful back as he merged into the
crowd of partygoers, and wonders if things might have
been different if he had obeyed his first instinct and
followed, tapped him on the back and tried to engage for
half an hour or more on the benefits of Anglo-American
trade and commerce.

What an astonishing benefit an open, extroverted
personality is, he thinks, with a sullen glance around at
diners in nearby tables. To his right, a portly gentleman
with slicked back hair laughs at his own joke. The rest of
his table, mainly younger men, perhaps business associates, all follow suit. Extroversion, Ismay thinks, is the
currency of so much, of friendship, trade, romance, and
love. At times it almost seems the measure of virtue. It’s a
man’s calling card and his advertisement; it flows ahead
of him in all directions, cementing his reputation, spreading word about his qualities, and perhaps most important
of all, securing for him what he may one day need more
than anything else: the benefit of the doubt.

“What are you thinking of now, Father?”

So deep is Ismay’s unhappy concentration upon the
browned mushrooms, mashed potato and dark game, it
takes a moment for him to focus properly on Evelyn.
When this happens there is no concealing the fact he has
been elsewhere. Her knife and fork are lying across her
plate and she is like a statue, watching him. This is a trick
picked up from her mother: several years ago she started
to react to his mealtime silences by calmly giving up on
her own food and waiting; when at last he emerged from
his thoughts, she would let him guess how long she had
been sitting there motionless.

An expression somewhere between concern and exasperation now struggles on Evelyn’s face. When she speaks,
her voice is quiet, almost conspiratorial. “Don’t you think
you deserve simply to enjoy yourself without brooding
about things, Father?”

The question is invasive. He can feel it carving into his
chest cavity, slicing close to his heart. Julia, his wife,
knows how to choose a specific detail of his business;
most likely these days it would be something to do with a
bequest in his will, the inability of his solicitor to get the
wording just right to cover all eventualities. But Evelyn
has left her meaning gaping with her use of the word
things
, and by her ominous, overly tender tone.
Paradoxically, because it specifies nothing, it can have
only one meaning: the
Titanic
.