The Last Lifeboat, page 20
Mass-Observation, Diarist #6385
29
Mid-Atlantic. 22 September 1940
Day Five
Alice wakes with a sense of quiet optimism. Since the encounter with the whales and the reviving thrill of the swim, and with a gradual improvement in Molly’s condition, there is plenty to feel hopeful about. It seems to Alice that others feel the same, that despite their inevitable physical deterioration, the tense atmosphere of previous days is slowly lifting. But Billy’s worsening cough still worries her. Like a lioness watching her cubs, she keeps a close eye on the boy. She asks him to recite his times tables so that she can assess his lucidity while she presses her hand to his forehead to check his temperature.
‘Your face is a bit warm, Billy. How do you feel?’
‘I’m so thirsty, Auntie.’ His voice rasps, his throat bone-dry and sore from coughing.
‘I know, dear. Try to think about something else. The pigeons back home. All the new marbles you’ll play with after we’re rescued.’
When the midday meal comes around, Alice turns away so that nobody can see as she quickly gives Billy her ration of water. ‘I don’t feel thirsty today, so you can have mine. But let’s keep it a secret, just between you and me.’
Billy presses a finger to his lips and promises not to tell.
It is then Alice’s turn on watch. They still follow the lookout rota they’d established on the first day, when everyone was convinced a rescue ship would reach them at any moment. They continue it now as something to do, rather than out of any real expectation of seeing anything. The false alarms are fewer now that everyone has adapted to their surroundings and can better distinguish a low cloud from a potential plume of steam from a ship’s funnel, but the actual sighting of a ship that they so desperately long for continues to elude them.
Alice scans the horizon, ever hopeful, but her thoughts drift far beyond the point at which the ocean meets the sky, retracing the many miles they’ve travelled, until she is back on the deck of the Carlisle and Howard is returning her mislaid copy of David Copperfield.
She sees the wild exuberance in his eyes, his head tipped back in laughter as the lively debate about Schrödinger’s cat passed around the table during their last meal together. He had such a bright mind, such a warm soul, that the few days she’d known him felt like months. Time expanded. Emotions heightened. Beryl Barnes had said Howard reminded her of a hero from an Austen novel. Alice had pointed out that some of Austen’s most memorable heroes were not like Howard at all. They were the exact opposite, in fact.
‘So, what is your story then, Alice King? What really makes someone like you volunteer to sail across the Atlantic in the middle of a war?’
Alice stirs from her thoughts, and looks over her shoulder. Owen has a habit of launching into a conversation without any prelude. ‘Someone like me? Someone boring, you mean?’
He smiles. ‘I wouldn’t exactly call this boring. You just seem like the quiet, serious type. The type to stay at home and settle with some sensible young chap from the village. The headmaster, perhaps. Or the vicar’s son. And don’t tell me some charitable nonsense about doing your bit. I mean, what really made you volunteer to escort the CORB kids? Because I know there’s a story. There’s always a story.’
Alice doesn’t answer his question immediately. There were so many reasons, all falling into place like a line of toppled dominos, one event and decision leading to the next until destiny had swept her up and spat her out in an Atlantic storm.
‘It was a chance to do something other than stamping library books, something useful I felt I could do well. And it gave me a chance to get away.’
‘From?’
She takes a deep breath. ‘From the war. And from me, I suppose.’
Owen offers a rueful smile. ‘How’s that working out for you?’
‘Not particularly well.’
‘It isn’t so easy is it, to change who we are by changing where we are. The past has a nasty habit of following us around. I believe it’s called regret.’
‘My father said we should always look forward, not back, that you can’t change the past, but the past can change the future, if you want it to.’
‘Sounds like he talks a lot of sense.’
‘He did.’
‘Ah. Past tense. Sorry.’ Owen pulls the blanket around his shoulders. ‘You want to talk about it? Him?’
Alice shakes her head.
‘Another time then. Over a decent bottle of whisky. Whenever we get out of this crappy lifeboat.’ He holds a hand out to Alice. ‘Deal?’
She shakes his hand, even though the prospect of a time when they aren’t in the lifeboat feels like the greatest work of fiction ever written. She hardly dares to think about other days at all. Life has been reduced to fragments – a few inches of space, a dipper of water, a sliver of food. She inhabits minutes and hours now, anything bigger impossible to grasp. And yet she must imagine a time beyond the lifeboat; another life, a second chance. Without that, without hope, she may as well slip into the water now and let it carry her away.
A pair of gulls follows the lifeboat as the sun rises high in the afternoon sky, dripping warmth and light onto the lifeboat like honey from a spoon. Alice watches the birds for a long time as they soar overhead, their calls and cries a balm to ears that have heard nothing new for days. Alice wishes she were a bird, wings spread wide as she launches herself from the lifeboat and glides effortlessly into the sky, her bones light as air, her aches and pains diminished. Like the whales, the gulls also offer fresh hope, a sign that they’re within reasonable distance of land. For a while, the gulls settle on the water, a short distance from the lifeboat. As Alice watches them, a white feather drifts toward her. She reaches carefully over the side of the lifeboat and scoops it up. It reminds her of the envelope Lily Nicholls gave to her. A lucky talisman … A silly superstition.
Molly is still wearing Alice’s jacket. The girl is sleeping; recovering. Careful not to disturb her, Alice checks the jacket pockets and finds the sodden envelope, the words CORB escort written in smudged black ink on the front. Inside the envelope, she finds a bedraggled white feather, and a single damp sheet of paper. The writing is barely legible, the ink smudged.
Thank you for escorting my children on their long journey. I would be very grateful if you could write a few lines to me at the address below, about where the children are staying in Canada, and who with. It is unbearable not to know. With my sincere thanks, Lily Nicholls, mother to Georgie (10) and Arthur (7½).
Alice folds the soggy page into a small square, returns it to the envelope and puts it back in her jacket pocket. She looks at Arthur Nicholls, aged seven and a half, and wishes she could somehow tell his mother that her son is alive. Alice presumes that Lily will have been given the dreadful news by now that her son didn’t survive, and yet there he is, in front of her, and very much alive. She is reminded of Howard’s thought experiment and how like Schrödinger’s cat they are as they drift across the Atlantic, simultaneously dead and alive.
She is so lost in her thoughts that when a shrill cry of, ‘Ship! There’s a ship!’ cuts through the lethargic silence, she hardly stirs.
But the cry comes again.
‘Look, Auntie! There’s a ship!’ Arthur nearly loses his balance in his sudden excitement as he shakes her shoulder. ‘There’s a real ship! Over there.’
Alice sits up straight and looks around in every direction. ‘Where, Arthur?’
Behind her, Owen clambers to his knees.
Jimmy leaps up from his place at the front of the lifeboat. ‘Bloody hell. He’s right. There is a ship!’
Dead ahead, a large vessel steams into view. Alice fixes her gaze on the plume of smoke billowing from one of the smokestacks. It is unmistakable this time. Not a cloud, but a real ship. And it is headed straight for them.
Everyone is suddenly frantic. From a state of listless stupor, all is noise and movement. Whoops and cries of ‘Help! Over here!’ join a banging of tins and a wild waving of arms. Bobby sets off the single flare they have left. In their excitement, Robert and Hamish lift up their tarpaulin shelter and toss it into the ocean.
Soon the ship is close enough for Alice to make out the small but definite forms of people on deck. It is almost too much. She can’t find any words. Can’t believe their prayers have been answered.
Cautious relief spreads around the lifeboat as everyone looks for a way to catch the crew’s attention.
‘We need a flag. Something bright to help them see us,’ Jimmy says.
Alice wriggles out of the pink slip she’s wearing beneath her blouse. ‘Here. Use this.’
Jimmy ties the slip to the rope on the mast and hoists it up.
Owen stands beside Alice, and laughs. ‘Who’s ridiculous now?’
Alice looks up at her underwear, flapping madly in the breeze and can’t help laughing herself.
Everyone who can, cries out and waves, desperate for someone to confirm they’ve been seen. A signal of some sort, a whistle, a flare.
‘Can’t they see us?’ Robert asks. ‘Why don’t they signal?’
A minute passes, two minutes, three. Still they wait for an acknowledgement that they’ve been sighted. Their first euphoric cries of celebration become more urgent. ‘Over here! We’re over here!’
And then the unthinkable happens.
‘Why is it turning around?’ Billy asks.
‘I don’t know.’ Alice pulls him close to her. ‘I don’t know.’
Arthur reaches for her hand. ‘Where’s it going, Auntie?’
‘It’s leaving,’ Robert says. ‘Why is it leaving us?’
More urgent shouts go up from the lifeboat, everyone frantic now in their desperation to be spotted. Alice waves her arms above her head and joins the cries for help. ‘Over here! We need help! Please! Over here!’
The ship doesn’t respond.
Alice’s cries for help become tears of despair as she sinks down onto the thwarts, dizzy from her efforts, distraught as she leans against the gunwale and watches the ship sail away, her cries for help unheard, just as they were once before.
She closes her eyes and sees a chessboard in front of her. She is ten years old. She can hear the sea through the open window of her grandmother’s sitting room, and she bites her bottom lip as she always does when she is concentrating. Her father leans back in the chair opposite her, rubs his moustache, and smiles.
‘Your move, Alice. Take your time. Think it through. Remember to always look ahead.’
Chess is their favourite game. Nobody else in the family plays and Alice is glad to spend time alone with her father while Walter is fishing with friends and her mother and grandmother take Kitty to the doctor to get something for her cough. Alice enjoys the mental challenge of the game, the quiet puzzling of possibilities, the anticipation of what her opponent might do in response to her actions.
Finally, she makes her move. White knight takes black knight. She lifts her father’s piece triumphantly.
He smiles and nods, acknowledging a smart move, but as he looks at Alice there is a shift, a pause as his smile morphs into an expression she has never seen before. His hand freezes in mid-air and then he slumps over the desk and falls, with an appalling thud, to the floor.
‘Daddy! Daddy!’
The voice, the screams, are hers, but they seem to come from someone else, from somewhere else – a different place and time when she is still playing chess and not watching the terrifying flood of viscous crimson that spreads from her father’s nose and ears onto the Persian rug.
She crawls beneath the desk and shakes him gently. ‘Daddy? Daddy, wake up. Please, wake up.’
His silence, his stillness, is terrifying.
She runs to the sitting room door and shouts for help, but there is nobody home. Afraid and alone in a house that isn’t hers, she runs back to her father, the man who always keeps her safe, who always knows what to do. She doesn’t know how to help him. ‘What should I do, Daddy? I don’t know what to do!’ She drapes her arms across him, rests her head on his back and tells him it will be all right, not to be frightened, just as he has done for her so many times when she’s been afraid during a thunderstorm.
For a long time, there is silence.
She doesn’t know how long she is there, or who finds them.
All she remembers is hiding in the back of her grandmother’s wardrobe, her hands pressed against her ears so that she can’t hear the awful commotion downstairs, doors opening and closing, cries and shouts, voices and footsteps coming and going, rushing, rushing, rushing, until she hears Walter calling her name. ‘Alice? Alice, where are you?’
Stoker yaps and barks at the wardrobe door, until Walter finds her and carries her out into the muted light of early evening. The black knight is still gripped in her hand. Walter says there was nothing she could have done, that the doctor said the aneurysm in his brain was fatal, his death instantaneous, but she doesn’t believe him. Her father is dead because she didn’t know what to do, and her cries for help weren’t heard.
After all the chaos and noise, the house is infused with a dense silence; an absence of life, an emptiness. Everyone speaks in whispers. Alice doesn’t cry. She is numb and withdrawn. The doctor tells her she’s had an awful shock, that it will take time to recover, but she knows she never will because the only person who can possibly comfort her is the very person for whom she is grieving.
‘Alice?’ Owen is shaking her shoulder. ‘Alice!’
She opens her eyes and looks at him, uncertain for a moment where she is, and then she remembers the ship turning around, sailing away from them.
‘You slept for ages. Dinner is served, madam.’
She pushes his hand away.
‘You have to eat,’ he says. ‘Keep your strength up.’
She shakes her head. Closes her eyes.
There have been many dark moments since the Carlisle first trembled beneath Alice’s feet, but having watched the ship sail away from them, she feels a new level of despair engulf her. She looks at the children, so pale and thin. She has no answer to their questions as to why it sailed away. No words of reassurance to offer. She’d made a promise to Jimmy’s father to get the children home to their mothers, but stories and games and hope can’t keep them alive indefinitely. There was, surely, only one miraculous end to their story, only one ship that would save them, and it has gone, taking thirty-five lives with it.
30
London. September 1940
Lily’s stomach lurches as the train pulls away from the station platform at King’s Cross. Once again, she feels torn in two – desperate to be in Scotland when Georgie arrives, but reluctant to leave London in case there is news of Arthur. She’d always told the children that if they got lost when she took them to see the Christmas windows in the West End, they should stay where they were when they’d last seen her, and not go wandering off to look for her. She is breaking her own rule.
She takes some comfort from the fact that Ada Fortune has agreed to stay at number 13 for the time being. She’d come to Elm Street after learning the fate of the Carlisle through a hysterical Mrs Carr. Lily was shocked to discover that Molly Carr was on the ship with her nanny, and that neither was listed among the survivors. Like Lily, Ada had been to the CORB offices where she was told that none of her five children had survived. It was devastating news. Lily felt terrible to leave Ada in such distress, but Elsie and Mrs H promised to take good care of her. There was no end, it seemed, to the suffering 13 Elm Street would bear witness to.
The train compartment carries the hush of early morning. Lily rests her cheek against the window and watches London’s grey industry give way to a tapestry of berry-rich hedgerows and furrowed fields. Beside her, Kitty presses Pan-Cake to her cheeks and nose. She looks a little green and says she doesn’t travel well on trains. Across the compartment, sleepy passengers and weary soldiers on leave quietly read newspapers or doze in the gentle autumn sun. Lily holds Arthur’s toy rabbit in her hands and strokes the patches in the velvet ears where his fingers have rubbed away the nap. The agony of not knowing what condition Georgie is in, or where Arthur is, hits her in waves, but there is purpose in the momentum of the train, a sense of moving forward rather than sitting in her kitchen like a stagnant pond.
The possibility that a lifeboat from another ship in the Carlisle’s convoy was counted among the twelve recovered from the site of the sinking has given Lily real reason to hope. Kitty has brought more documents and charts which Lily studies to try and work out the direction a missing lifeboat could have sailed in. Instinct and hope are fragile things. Facts and calculations lend them structure and rigidity.
Somewhere outside York, the train stops to take on water and coal and to change drivers.
‘I sometimes wish life would pull into the sidings,’ Lily remarks as she watches the firemen and stokers work. ‘That you could pause to take stock; prepare yourself for the next stage of the journey.’
Kitty adjusts the bobby pins in her hair, holding them between her lips as she finds the exact place for them among her carefully managed curls. ‘I don’t want life to pause. I want to get on with it. I’d especially like to get to the part where we aren’t in a war.’
‘But don’t you ever wish you could stay exactly where you are, with the people you’re with, doing whatever it is you’re doing? Just stay in that moment for a while rather than hurtle on to the next thing?’
Kitty fixes the last pin and leans her head against the back of the seat. ‘Honestly, I can’t say I’ve ever had a moment I’d want to stay in. Most of the time, I’m desperate for things to speed up, for the clock to reach five so I can leave work, for the weekend to begin, for the song to end so the man I’m dancing with will buy me another gin. If you have a moment you’d want to stay in, you’re lucky.’
