The Last Lifeboat, page 17
The dim light of evening turns toward the dense black of night. Still soaked to the skin, Alice sits with Molly as the child drifts in and out of lucidity and takes small sips of water from the dipper. Nobody says anything more about it. All they can do now is hope she doesn’t get any worse.
The boys are shocked by Molly’s illness and the drama of Alice going overboard. They are also impressed by how quickly Owen jumped in to save her.
‘You’ve made quite the impression on them,’ Alice says as they sit quietly after the light has faded. ‘You’re like a character from one of Hamish’s adventure stories. A real-life hero.’
Owen dismisses the notion. ‘Heroes are for fiction. Made-up nonsense. I’m not a hero. Far from it.’
Alice turns to face him. His profile is just visible beneath the intermittent moonlight. She thinks back to the first morning when he’d offered her the whisky, how she’d thought of him as a man made of granite, gruff and outspoken, provocative and foul-mouthed. But his hard edges have worn away, eroded by the wind and the struggle to survive.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘For earlier.’
He shrugs. ‘No big deal. Fancied a swim anyway. I didn’t go in just for you, you know.’ He smiles.
Alice smiles back. ‘Definitely not a hero then.’
‘Definitely not.’
‘You’re not really a stowaway either, are you?’
He takes a deep breath. ‘Not exactly.’
‘So, what are you then? Who are you?’
‘You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.’ He takes the blanket from around his shoulders and passes it to Alice. ‘Here. Wind’s picking up again.’
‘It can’t be my turn already. You’ve only just been given it.’
‘And now I’m giving it to you. Looks like we could be in for another rough night. Try to get some rest. You’ve had an eventful day. I’ll watch the girl.’
Alice is grateful, relieved, exhausted. ‘Thank you.’
He offers a thin smile. ‘Pleasure, neighbour.’
The children become fretful as they feel the pronounced sway of the lifeboat and the rising strength of the wind. They know this sensation now, know these sounds.
Afraid of the dark and the returning storm, the children huddle together. Billy presses up as close as he can to Alice’s side and holds her hand. Arthur clambers onto Alice’s lap and wraps his arms around her neck. He is nothing but a feather, and yet the weight of responsibility she feels for him is immense. She looks at the identification label still attached to his coat and imagines Lily Nicholls at her kitchen table, labelling her son like a post office package. Evacuation was unbearably cruel. It had been presented as such a selfless, honourable thing, a patriotic act to protect the next generation and secure Britain’s future. Alice thinks about the footage she’d watched on the newsreels at the picture house. ‘There go Britain’s young ambassadors, smiling and waving as their ship departs!’ What she sees in those images now isn’t children proudly waving goodbye, but children desperately crying out for help as they drown. War is an ugly, brutal business. Walter was right to want nothing to do with it.
She closes her eyes and squeezes Billy’s hand with one of hers as she rests her other against Arthur’s cheek, pressing strength and reassurance into them both. They are both so cold, their skin brittle and crusted with salt. Like barnacles, they are stuck to her now, their fates, and their lives, permanently entwined.
24
London. September 1940
Like a moth drawn to light, driven by an instinctive urge she isn’t fully in control of, Lily returns to the place where it had all started on a warm June morning.
She steps off the bus at the top of The Mall, buttons her coat and points her feet in the direction of Mayfair and Berkeley Street, but she can’t make herself move. She stands on the spot, swaying like a daffodil blown by a stiff breeze as people sidestep around her and hurry past. It’s the first time she’s been into the West End since the Blitz started. She finds the bustle and noise brash and intrusive. There’s an arrogance here, an unpleasant air of ‘Britain will prevail’ superiority. She hates it, shouldn’t have come, isn’t thinking straight, but she can’t get the phrase, ‘limit of convoy’ out of her head. It had been Lily’s understanding that evacuee ships would be escorted, in convoy, all the way to Canada. If they weren’t under naval escort when the torpedo hit, that changes everything. The need for answers propels her on.
She doesn’t feel fully within herself as she begins to walk, everything muffled and distant, as if she is underwater. She passes flirtatious women in uniform, arms linked, laughing as they share a cigarette and try to catch the attention of a soldier in front of them. She doesn’t understand how they can be so carefree when there’s a war on and children are being blown out of their beds by German torpedoes. She blinks back gritty tears and hurries on, head down, certain that everyone she passes can sense her erratic state of mind and see the grief etched on her face.
She heads toward Green Park, and on, until she reaches the CORB offices. She stops. For a moment she is back in the sweltering heat of a June morning, the fabric of her dress sticking to her skin. ‘Walk away, Lily. Turn around. Go home.’ It is three months since she’d signed the children up for the scheme. It feels like three years.
She approaches cautiously, mistrusting her emotional state. Anger has summoned her back, but now she is here she feels only an unfathomable sorrow that circumstances ever brought her here in the first place. Outside the office doors, the once bright geraniums are now withered brown sticks in their pots. The sign is turned to closed. The blackout blinds are pulled down. She remembers the ease with which the neatly turned-out woman behind the counter had taken her completed application form. It had all been made to feel so straightforward, so simple. A minor inconvenience to send your children away. And now, just like Arthur, the ruby-lipped women with their forms and clipboards and authoritative stamps have vanished. It’s as if the entire scheme never existed. The empty building left behind hangs its head in shame and remorse.
The church clock chimes the half hour as Lily sinks down onto the cold stone steps, a wretched broken thing as her grief overwhelms her again. She feels a tightness in her chest, her breathing restricted by the lump of grief lodged there like a boulder. She shouldn’t have come. She isn’t ready to confront this, any of it.
‘I’d be closed too if I’d sent all those kiddies to their deaths.’
Lily looks up. A woman stands in front of her.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ the woman says. ‘Don’t know where to go. I just keep wandering around, wishing things were different. I don’t even know why I came here, or what I hoped to find. Someone to blame? Someone to tell me why it happened?’ She dabs a handkerchief to the tears that spill down her cheeks as she looks at Lily. ‘What can we do?’
‘We can demand answers,’ Lily says.
‘From who?’
‘From those in charge.’
‘What does it matter? It won’t bring our children back.’
Lily stands up and bangs on the door. ‘Maybe not. But someone has to be held accountable. Someone has to take responsibility for what’s happened.’
She is about to leave when the door opens slightly. A pale-faced woman peers out at Lily. ‘I’m afraid we’re closed until further notice.’
‘I want to speak to Anthony Quinn, or someone in charge.’ Lily’s grief solidifies into anger again, a rod of resolve to get answers for her children. ‘I want to know if the escort ships were still with the Carlisle when it was hit.’
The woman looks at Lily, then at the woman standing beside her, and bursts into tears. ‘I’m so sorry. We’re all so terribly sorry. There’ll be an official announcement in the newspapers. When all the parents have been informed.’
Lily finds the words chilling. ‘All the parents.’ How many lives have been shattered by this terrible news?
‘I don’t care about an official announcement,’ she says. ‘I want to know where my son is, and why nobody is looking for him.’
Behind Lily, someone hurries up the steps, heels clacking against the granite. Lily recognizes her face, but can’t remember why.
The woman perched in the doorway gasps. ‘Kitty! Oh, you poor love. I’m so sorry. You shouldn’t have come. It’s all so terrible.’
The young woman glances at Lily as she hurries past. Lily lunges toward her and grabs her arm as she reaches the doorway.
‘Kitty is it? Can you help me?’ She is desperate now to be heard, to be listened to. ‘Please, can somebody help me!’
Kitty gently removes Lily’s hand from her arm. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Lily. Lily Nicholls. My children are Georgina and Arthur.’
Kitty nods. ‘Go home, Mrs Nicholls. Please. We are still trying to understand exactly what happened and what condition the survivors are in.’
‘Did the escort ships leave the convoy?’
The question prompts an uncertain glance between the two CORB women. The one called Kitty asks Lily what she means.
‘I know about the limit of convoy escort. I want to know the truth. I want to know if the escort had left the convoy before the torpedo hit. And I want to know where my son is.’
Kitty looks at Lily. ‘We are all so sorry, Mrs Nicholls. The best thing you can do for your son now is to go home and let us do our jobs. We’ll be in touch if there is any further news.’
Lily hears the echo of her conversation with Ada Fortune, here, on these very steps, not three months ago. Our job is to stay alive until they come back.
She has no more energy to argue and fight. She just wants her children home.
Defeated, deflated, she turns and walks away.
Time seems suspended now, paused in the moment when she first read the devastating letter from CORB. She hangs her coat and hat on the stand in the hall, uses the outhouse, kicks off her shoes and pads through to the kitchen, her stockinged feet flinching against the chill of the quarry tiles in the hallway. She imagines Georgie hopping from one square to the next, insisting it is bad luck to step on the lines. Superstitious, just like her mother.
She bundles up all the CORB paperwork on the kitchen table and pushes it back into the drawer along with all the odds and ends of life that have accumulated there over the years: balls of string, birthday candles, matches, spare buttons, fuses, nails and screws. Before she shuts the drawer, she rests her hand on the Huntley and Palmers biscuit tin pushed to the back. She thinks about the things inside it, placed there for safekeeping, too painful to read, too precious to ignore. Go back inside, Lil. It’s freezing. I’ll write when I get to the training camp. She misses Peter’s calm voice more than ever, but she shuts the drawer anyway. It sticks on its runners and needs a shove with her hip. She doesn’t need to read what’s inside the biscuit tin. She already knows every word.
Utterly exhausted, she sinks into a chair at the kitchen table and leans forward, her palms pressed against the rough wood that anchors her to this place. It was her mother’s table before it became hers, her grandmother’s before that. An island of family life, where three generations of women had eaten, laughed, loved, and wept. It lends her some comfort, a sense of life continuing, with all its impossible sorrows and gentle solace.
Her head in a cradle of folded arms, she eventually sleeps. She dreams she’s a feather, floating on the surface of the ocean as someone – Peter? – tries again and again to scoop her up, but she keeps drifting away, carried by the shifting waves, always just out of reach.
5 March 1940
Try to find a moment of quiet and calm in each day. Not always easy (mostly impossible), but I try to be grateful for all the wonderful things I have, instead of being angry about what has been taken from me. It’s lonely being surrounded by memories and worry and doubt. They don’t have a leaflet with instructions for that. That bit, we have to work out for ourselves.
Mass-Observation, Diarist #6672
25
Mid-Atlantic. 21 September 1940
Day Four
Alice reaches for Molly’s hand as the first pale brushstrokes of a new day stretch across the horizon. The girl’s skin is cold to the touch.
‘Molly? It’s Auntie. It’s the morning.’
She doesn’t move.
Alice shakes her gently. ‘Can you hear me, Molly? Move your hand if you can hear me.’
Molly’s fingers stir. Alice breathes a sigh of relief. She has survived the night, at least.
Alice leans back against the thwarts. She is light-headed and dizzy, her body weak, her mind losing its grip on reality. Painful cramps and pins and needles come and go in her arms and legs. A fog of exhaustion sits across her forehead like a vice. She’d sat up with Molly all night, encouraging her to take sips of water, wrapping blankets around her to keep her as warm as possible, calming her when she became delirious. Even when Owen and others had taken their turn to watch the child, Alice couldn’t rest.
Beneath the thin light of dawn, while others still sleep, she idly scrapes a fingernail against the fine layer of salt that has formed on her teeth. She inspects it briefly, both disgusted and fascinated by it, before wiping it on the edge of her skirt. She lifts her arm and sniffs her armpit, repulsed by the sour odour of damp and sweat that clings to her. She breathes onto her hand and places it to her nose to check her breath. The smell of fish and decay turns her stomach. Her skin is spongy and pale, like well-proved bread dough that leaves little indentations when she presses her fingers into it. She doesn’t recognize the way her body looks, or feels, or smells. She is disgusting; stripped of everything but the most basic human needs to survive.
Eventually, the children begin to wake; a gaggle of scruffy urchins peeling wayward limbs from each other as they emerge from beneath their tarpaulin shelter and begin the chorus of greetings that now marks the start of each day.
Billy looks at Molly, so still and lifeless beside him. ‘Did Molly die?’
They are all obsessed with death. Are they going to die? Will somebody else die? Will they be buried at sea if they die?
Alice assures Billy that Molly is just resting. ‘That’s the best thing for her now. Rest and water.’
Rest and water are all they can offer the poor child. Alice prays it will be enough. For all of them. Billy’s cough has worsened again, the rasping wheeze now thick with phlegm that he spits out over the side of the lifeboat. Every hour, their situation seems to deteriorate. Alice feels demented in her despair and frustration. Why haven’t they been rescued? She doesn’t, cannot, understand.
Exhausted after her sleepless night, Alice feels her patience with the children wearing thin. Sometimes she thinks she’s going mad, hearing voices from her past, seeing things that aren’t there. She has seen Kitty and Walter waving to her from the other end of the lifeboat, and her father telling her to come and look at the moon, and she is certain she can see a dark shape in the water, just off the bow of the lifeboat.
She ignores it at first, convinced it is a trick of the light or another vision conjured from her muddled mind, but then a plume of spray arcs across the water and a slick blue-grey back breaks the surface.
‘A whale!’ Alice whispers, afraid she’ll startle it if she shouts out. ‘There’s a whale.’
Owen sees it at the same time. ‘Christ! Was that what I thought it was?’
‘Yes!’ Alice laughs, a little hysterical. ‘A whale!’
As if to silence any doubt, the creature dives and its enormous tail flukes rise gracefully out of the water.
Alice gasps. It is so shocking, so immense, so close to the lifeboat, but she doesn’t feel the slightest bit afraid. ‘It’s beautiful!’ Tears spill down her cheeks as she holds her hands to her chest. ‘It’s wonderful!’
‘There’s another! Look!’ Arthur points to a second smaller whale as it surfaces beside the first with a loud puff from its blowhole.
Everyone who is awake watches the whales in awed silence. Those who are asleep are gently encouraged to wake up. Even Molly briefly revives a little. The children kneel up and grip the gunwale, their faces full of wonder as the enormous creatures swim parallel to the lifeboat and then dive, their tail flukes spreading like great black wings across the water. For twenty minutes, maybe more, tired gritty eyes are soothed by the mesmerizing presence of something so big and alive when their world has become so small and lifeless. Then the whales dive one last time, and are gone.
Alice sits quietly with her thoughts as others talk about what they’ve just seen, and what it might mean: a portent of good luck, or perhaps a sign that they are close to offshore feeding grounds.
Owen sits down beside her. ‘Sure beats that lifeless skeleton in the Natural History Museum.’
Alice brushes a tear from her cheek and shakes her head in disbelief. ‘That’s your response? Do you ever just see the beauty in things, or does everything have to boil down to a clever remark?’
Owen leans forward to stretch out his back. Alice waits for a reply, but, infuriatingly, none comes.
26
London. September 1940
Lily is woken by a knock at the front door. She opens her eyes. The knocking comes again, three quick raps followed by a fourth, after a beat.
She sits up and takes a moment to adjust to the light. Her head thumps, her eyes are pools of sand, gritty when she blinks, and her nose is sore from being constantly dabbed at with a handkerchief. She wishes she were still asleep, wishes she didn’t have to remember that the Carlisle has sunk and Arthur is missing, presumed dead. The phrase sits like a lump of granite in her heart, the name ARTHUR PETER NICHOLLS chiselled onto it in thick block lettering. She gasps, unable for a moment to catch her breath.
