The Last Lifeboat, page 22
Her thoughts drift back to the first moments after the torpedo strike, when she’d tried to access the lower cabins and faced the terrifying reality of what had happened. Perhaps it would have been better to die in the immediate impact rather than endure this interminable nightmare, suspended in a sort of half-life. As she looks at the now familiar faces in the lifeboat, a dreadful thought occurs to her: not which one of them death will take next, but who it will leave until last.
Another afternoon is washed away and the honeyed hue of gentle evening light settles over the lifeboat. Too tired and weak to question the how and why of things anymore, Alice feels a sense of inevitability wash over her. She doesn’t feel the urge to rail and roar at the ocean like Jimmy. There is a peacefulness in quietly accepting her fate. Not giving up, but letting go.
‘What are you thinking about, Auntie?’ Arthur asks. ‘You look sad.’
She reaches for his arm, but her vision is intermittently blurred and she misjudges the distance and grabs his leg instead.
‘I’m thinking about home, Arthur,’ she says, her words muffled and tired. ‘About my father, mostly.’
‘My daddy died,’ Arthur says. ‘He went to sleep and didn’t wake up.’
‘I’m very sorry to hear that. My daddy died, too.’
‘What did he die of?’
For the first time, Alice finds the words. ‘Something went wrong in his head. Nobody knows why. I was ten years old. The same age as your sister.’
She still can’t fathom how someone you love so much can be talking to you one minute, and the next, like a candle blown out, they’re gone. All that life, extinguished.
‘My daddy wrote Mummy a letter. She said all the soldiers write one when they go to war and it is sent home if they die. Did your daddy write a letter?’
Alice shakes her head. She wonders what he would have said if he’d had the chance. What do you say, when it’s the last thing you’ll ever write? How do you say your very last goodbye?
‘We should write a letter,’ Robert says. ‘A message in a bottle. People always do that when they’re stranded on a desert island, or lost at sea.’
Owen stirs. His American persona back on display. ‘Hey. That’s not a bad idea, kid. We have the empty whisky bottle. Does anyone have paper? Anything to write with?’
‘I have paper.’ Alice asks Molly to look in the pocket of her jacket where she finds the letter Alice had written to her father while they were delayed in Liverpool. ‘Here.’ Alice hands the paper to Owen. ‘Use this.’
‘And we are writing with invisible ink, I presume?’
‘Somebody must have a pen, or a pencil. Something.’
But nobody does.
Then Alice remembers the gull feather she’d fished out of the ocean. She takes it out of her skirt pocket. ‘Could we use this? Like a quill. Is there something we can dip it into? Anything in one of the supply tins?’
Hamish suggests blood. ‘Pirates always use their blood to write with.’
Owen says it isn’t the worst idea.
‘What would we write?’ Alice asks.
Jimmy has calmed down a little. He likes the idea of sending a message, to let someone know they’d survived. ‘We should write the name of the ship. The number of adults and children in the lifeboat. The date. The direction we’re sailing in.’
Owen makes a nick in his thumb with the edge of an empty tin of Carnation milk. Jimmy does the same. Dipping the end of the gull feather into the beads of blood that form on their skin, Owen slowly writes the words SS Carlisle, Lifeboat 12, 6 ch/29 ad, and the date which, according to the notches he’s marked in the wood on the gunwale, is 22 September. He adds the words, ‘Remember us’, then rolls up the page, pushes it carefully into the whisky bottle and screws the cap back on.
‘Who’s doing the honours?’ he asks.
Alice suggests Robert, since it was his idea.
Everyone counts to three, and Robert drops the bottle into the ocean.
It bobs alongside the lifeboat for a while before slowly drifting away. The final chapter of thirty-five lives captured in a few short words, a final act of hope that, one day, somebody will know they were here, that they mattered, that they tried.
That night, the stars dazzle in a cloudless sky and the water shimmers beneath the steady forward motion of the lifeboat.
‘Bioluminescence,’ Alice says, struggling to enunciate the word as she explains it to the children. ‘The light you can see is from millions of tiny creatures.’
The children are mesmerized by the way the water lights up when they trail their fingers over the side of the lifeboat. Alice encourages them to see the beauty that surrounds them. She feels a childish sense of wonder herself, astonished by the unfathomable magnitude of the universe as she leans back and looks up at the sky.
‘Look up, children,’ she says. ‘Look how beautiful it is.’ The children stare up as she points out the constellations: the plough, Orion, the clear spiral of the Milky Way. ‘How lucky we are,’ she says as she reaches up a hand and imagines her fingers touching each source of light. ‘A ship full of miracles, beneath a sky full of stars.’ She counts thirty-nine stars before her eyelids flutter and close. Beside her, Arthur reaches seventy-three. And then there are no more stars, no more words, as Alice gives in to the pull of sleep, and lets herself drift away.
32
Glasgow. September 1940
Lily wakes in a small bedroom of a guesthouse perched above Greenock harbour. Too exhausted to put up the blackout screen when they’d arrived last night, she’d fallen into bed in the pitch dark. Now, from the iron bedstead in the middle of the room, she can see the calm waters of the Clyde glistening beneath the morning sun. She imagines Georgie waking to a similar view, pictures her waving from the deck as HMS Imperial approaches. They must be close now. She can feel it in the rush of blood that thumps against her chest, drawing her daughter to her like a magnet. Hurry up. Bring her home.
And Arthur? What is he looking at? What does he see when he wakes? Lily closes her eyes and pictures him in a lifeboat, his pale cheeks kissed by a gentle sun. He looks so content, so at peace, but he is so still. Too still. She wills him to move, urges him to fight against the weakening flutter of his little fledgling heart. She places her hands to her chest and wills the steady thud of her own heartbeat to become his. She breathes in and out, slow and steady, breathing life into him. ‘I’m coming, Arthur,’ she whispers. ‘Hold on a bit longer, love. We’re coming.’
She prepares for the day ahead in small, steady increments. She washes at the sink of the shared bathroom across the landing, brushes her teeth, teases out her finger waves and smooths her hair into side rolls. A hat will cover the rest. She pulls on her last half-decent pair of tan stockings, zips up her buttercup-yellow dress – Georgie’s favourite – throws a moss-green cardigan over her shoulders, pinches her cheeks to bring a bit of colour to her washed-linen complexion. Inside, she feels colourless and weak, but she needs to be strong and bright, for Georgie.
The breakfast room is at the front of the guesthouse, overlooking the harbour. Lily feels horribly self-conscious as she makes her way across the faded crimson carpet to join Kitty at a table beside the window. Ancient floorboards creak and squeak beneath her footsteps as if announcing her arrival. ‘Look, everyone! She’s one of the parents.’ She doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, especially in a room full of newspapermen. There is a sharp air of anticipation among the murmured conversations and the occasional clatter of teapots and cutlery.
Kitty wishes Lily good morning as she takes the chair opposite her. ‘Did you sleep?’
‘Not much. You?’
Kitty shakes her head. ‘Sat up all night, reading reports and correspondence about the Carlisle. It’s front-page news everywhere. People are demanding an inquiry.’
At tables around the room, government officials and newspaper reporters speak in hushed, urgent voices over plates of congealed egg and cold toast. Like Kitty and Lily, they pore over the morning newspapers, digesting the latest details of the tragedy, speculating about the inevitable questions and recriminations and demands for Churchill to retaliate. It seems to Lily that everyone in the guesthouse is there because of the imminent arrival of the Carlisle’s precious few survivors. She wonders if other parents have made the journey to Scotland, or if she’s the only one.
‘You look nice today,’ Kitty says as she nibbles a triangle of toast. ‘When the reporters realize who you are, they’ll want to ask questions and take your photograph. The newsreels might even want to take some film.’
‘I couldn’t give two figs how I look for their photographs and newsreels. I want to look nice for Georgie. That’s all.’
Lily pushes a poached egg around her plate. She has no appetite. Her stomach is as knotted as the coils of old fishing rope she can see on the wharf beyond the window.
Kitty kicks her under the table as Anthony Quinn enters the room and takes a seat with two other gentlemen at a table beside the fireplace. ‘That’s him. The one just sitting down.’
‘Are you sure he doesn’t know who I am?’ Lily keeps her voice low and pours tea from a pot. It dribbles and leaves a stain on the white tablecloth. She covers it with her napkin.
Kitty shakes her head. ‘If anyone asks, you’re with the Express. They’re all so caught up in their explanations and excuses, he won’t even notice you.’
Lily sips her tea and studies Mr Quinn. She’d expected someone much more impressive. The wiry-haired man across the room seems too wishy-washy to have held such enormous responsibility in his anxious little hands, too inconsequential to have become such a devastating part of so many lives. He pushes his spectacles onto his nose and consults some paperwork as he sips a cup of tea. His calm demeanour grates on Lily’s nerves. He should notice her. Maybe she will make him notice her.
‘Lily! Look at this.’ Kitty pushes a newspaper toward her. ‘It says here that one of the lifeboats recovered by HMS Imperial was from HMS Eagle. One of Carlisle’s lifeboats is unaccounted for, just as you said.’
Lily reads the newspaper report with a sense of anger and urgency and a sickening pulse of fear. The confirmation renews her hope for Arthur, but also stirs a lingering sense of dread. The thought of him, lost and alone and afraid, is unbearable. Her stomach churns. Constantly on the brink of tears, and certain she will vomit if she so much as looks at the egg on her plate, she fights to maintain her composure.
‘You’re a little pale,’ Kitty says. ‘Maybe you should get some fresh air.’
Lily is about to make a dash for it when the opening strains of the national anthem blare from the wireless cabinet in the corner of the room. Everyone stands up. Lily thinks of Peter and the dog, as she always does now when she hears the first bars of the music.
The king’s broadcast spreads around the small room. The sound of an air-raid siren wailing in the background is a poignant reminder to Lily that the war, and the Blitz, goes on, even if she is now far away from it. She thinks about Mrs H and Elsie Farnaby and poor Ada Fortune and wonders how they’re getting on. The king’s monotonous tone is steady and calm for a full ten minutes, then the familiar stutters and pauses return. ‘And here, I want to tell, the following parents, how deeply we grieve for them, over the loss of their children, in … in the ship torpedoed, without warning, in mid-Atlantic. Surely, the world could have no clearer proof, of the wickedness against which we fight, than this foul deed.’
Lily feels as if he is speaking directly to her, as if he is standing beside her, telling her how terribly sorry he is, and that he shares in her sorrow.
As the broadcast ends, two men at a table behind Lily speculate about revenge and reprisals. At another table, someone becomes an expert on the subject of hypothermia. Someone else asks the waitress if there’s any chance of more tea and toast. Lily feels her grief and distress meld into anger. How can everyone just sit there, enjoying their breakfast, while dozens of children have died and Arthur is missing? She refuses to count him among the dead.
As Mr Quinn leaves the room, Lily stands up.
Kitty asks her where she’s going.
‘I have to talk to him, Kitty. I can’t stand it, sitting here like a porcelain statue.’
She grabs Kitty’s documents, and her own paperwork with her notes and calculations, and walks as calmly as she can across the crimson carpet as she follows Mr Quinn from the room.
‘Excuse me. Mr Quinn? Could I have a word?’ Her heart thumps beneath her dress.
He turns and looks at her, then at his pocket watch. ‘Who are you with?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Which newspaper?’
‘The Express.’
‘Two minutes.’ He steps into a small reading room off the entrance hall and indicates two chairs beside a large window. ‘Fire ahead.’
Lily takes a deep breath and perches on the chair opposite him. She clutches the papers to her chest, thinks about her children, Ada Fortune’s children – all the CORB children – and wills herself to find the courage to speak.
‘I want to know why the naval escort abandoned the Carlisle.’
Mr Quinn peers at her over the bridge of his spectacles. The bluntness of her question has clearly disarmed him. ‘Well, that’s simply not true. There was no “abandoning”. The naval escort left the convoy, as planned, to rendezvous with an incoming supply convoy from Canada. It is always the way.’
‘Yes. The “limit of convoy escort”, I believe.’
Mr Quinn picks a hair from his jacket and straightens a cufflink. ‘That is correct.’
‘Something you failed to mention in your correspondence to parents. You told them the ship their children would sail on would be escorted, and in convoy. There was no mention of any limit.’
Lily looks at him. Challenging him.
‘I see you’ve done your homework.’ He leans back in the chair and studies her. ‘At the limit of convoy, escort ships depart and the convoy proceeds unescorted because it is considered safe to do so. The threat of U-boat activity is greatly reduced beyond that limit.’
‘Reduced, but not eliminated. And there have been recent reports of U-boat activity beyond the present limit of convoy, haven’t there? And yet the limit wasn’t revised. Also, not one ship from the convoy went to assist the Carlisle. Not one, out of eighteen. Not one, while children drowned. Why?’
Mr Quinn shuffles uncomfortably in his seat. He looks flustered; rattled. ‘It is a profoundly distressing tragedy, but the fact remains that we are a nation at war against a ruthless enemy. There is no absolute guarantee of safety. There never was. I made that perfectly clear in one of my first broadcasts. It was always a decision for the parents to take, having weighed up the relative risks. Everything else – limits of convoy, instructions to disperse – is merely detail, Miss …’
‘Nicholls. Mrs Nicholls.’ Lily feels heat rise in her cheeks. Her breathing is sharp and shallow. ‘And my children are NOT merely details!’
‘Your children?’
She takes a deep breath. ‘I’m not with the Express. I’m a mother, Mr Quinn. One of dozens of mothers whose children are missing, or dead. Your “merely details” are my last hope of understanding how this could ever happen. We trusted you. We put our children’s lives in your hands when all we ever wanted was to keep them in our own. How can we ever make peace with that, Mr Quinn? How can we ever be at peace?’
Her words, her grief, fill the small room so that she thinks she might suffocate beneath the weight of it all.
He looks at her, ashen-faced. ‘I’m so sorry, Mrs Nicholls.’
‘My children are—’
‘Georgina and Arthur.’ He nods. ‘I remember. I remember every name. Your daughter, Georgina, was picked up by HMS Imperial. Your son, Arthur, was not found.’ He leans forward and puts his head in his hands. His eyes glisten with tears when he looks up. ‘I am so terribly sorry, Mrs Nicholls. I wish there were something I could do to ease your suffering. Truly, I do.’
‘There is something you can do. We know a lifeboat from HMS Eagle was miscounted as one of Carlisle’s twelve lifeboats. There is still one lifeboat unaccounted for. I want you to keep searching for survivors.’
Mr Quinn shakes his head. ‘It’s impossible. Nobody could have survived this long.’
Lily picks up the papers covered in her pencil marks and carefully laid out notes, and pushes them toward him. ‘It is possible. I’ve studied the tides and the wind direction for the hours and days immediately after the Carlisle sank. Assuming the missing lifeboat was in a seaworthy condition and sat high in the water after it launched, unlike most of the other lifeboats, it is possible that it travelled beyond the initial search grid. I’ve done the calculations, Mr Quinn. It’s all there.’ She grabs his arm, anchoring herself to him until he understands. ‘What’s impossible is that I might never see my son again, never know what happened to him. That is impossible.’
Mr Quinn stacks the papers back into a neat pile. ‘Can I ask where you obtained all this information?’
‘A friend.’ She refuses to say anything further.
‘A friend who seems to know an awful lot about our operation.’ He steeples his hands and leans forward, pressing his fingertips to the bridge of his spectacles.
Lily’s heart thumps beneath her dress. ‘So? Will you order another search?’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Nicholls. I understand your agony, but we are already struggling to requisition sufficient vessels to escort supply convoys. Resources are stretched tight. It isn’t simply a case of sending HMS Imperial back. It is already assigned to another convoy.’
Lily feels her cheeks flush with anger. ‘Then at least redirect a ship already out there. There must be some way to keep looking.’ She points at the papers in front of him. ‘The location is right here. Send the RAF. Just do something. Please. I’m begging you.’ Lily grips his arm again, more tightly than she’d intended, her despair like a vice. ‘Do you have children, Mr Quinn?’
