Titanic Ashes, page 11
“Belgravia! Not Chelsea! Oh, Miranda, I’m so glad.”
“What?” The word comes out in a gasp. She fires a look at Graham whose neck is suddenly pink with embarrassment.
“My dear, the cat’s out of the bag! Graham has been telling me your plans.”
She stares at her mother. Defeat, she is beginning to realize, was almost inevitable but she’s amazed at Mother’s powers of resilience, her easy recovery. The tiredness has gone from her eyes, replaced by the malicious life and artificial poise that always seem to mark family celebrations.
“Yes, you got it out of me, Mrs. G., you’re far too clever, ” says Graham nervously, eyes darting toward Miranda.
Miranda knows it shouldn’t really matter whether Mother knows where they plan to live, and that she would find out anyway in time. But her not knowing gave Miranda a sense of security, albeit a symbolic one. Graham’s leak of the information has likely given Mother the go-ahead to descend upon everything, not only wedding preparations, but the precise house as well. She will surely pressure them both to buy a larger place than is financially comfortable. She will advise about staff, remind them both how she abhors the modern fad for doing without. She will give her views upon the schooling of their future children. In that word ‘Belgravia’ she has achieved the first victory, always the hardest to win. Now the precedent for Graham crumbling has been set, the barriers that keep Miranda from being too much like her mother will fall, one after the other, until one day in twenty or thirty years time, Mother’s face will gaze back at her from her mirror.
Graham continues to look desperate but Miranda is drifting away into defeat, just as Mother was a few minutes ago, sinking back into the recollection of Father’s study, of coming to give him his tobacco, and feeling his great meaty arms pull her onto his knee as he did every once in a while when the mood took him, usually after a long day’s work, some unexpected good news. She remembers laughing along with him, being told to “run along now.”
“COME TO THE PARK with us, ” Miranda says, flushed with the moment.
“I’ll have to write a letter, ” he says shaking his head, filling his pipe, “an important letter, Miranda.”
“Can’t you do it later?” she insists.
“Business first, pleasure later.” His low voice, vibrating through the furniture, seems to embody the spirit of an adult world that is beyond understanding, a world of pipes, tobacco, embossed leather, urgent letters and no parks, no swings, no outside at all. But the comfort it gives Miranda is profound, a return to cast-iron certainty after the strangeness of the Titanic, New York, and Mr. Johnston. She can almost forget there ever was such a man, that the summer in New York was merely part of an eerie dream from which she has now awakened.
Miranda backs off but holds onto the doorknob. She thinks about trying again. Father strikes his match and sets it into the bowl of his pipe, puffing and pulling. “A friend of your mother, Mr. Johnston in fact, has, through contacts, helped to get us a very important deal with a company in the United States. And I should not wait a moment before thanking him properly. Run along now!”
Miranda feels a blight in the air as her short legs try to keep up with Mother, watching from a yard’s distance the breeze shivering through her mother’s stole. The pavement is still slippery underfoot from the morning’s rain, and a wasp, lazy in the cooling air but persistent, buzzes around her head. Early fallen leaves scattered around in dry patches seem to whisper Mr. Johnston, Mr. Johnston, and Miranda tries to remember the conversation in the museum. She looks up at her mother, wondering how to dip once again into those mysteries, but Mother has that faraway look, the smile she reserves for stories of heroism, for their evocations in art and poetry. Selflessness and sacrifice are true measures of nobility—the phrase resurfaces, hauling many tangled strands of confusion. She said at the time that Father needed help but didn’t know how to ask for it. She also talked about discretion. And here is her father, her kindly but fearless father, reduced to blind, unknowing servility to Mr. Johnston at whom he, by rights, should be outraged.
The wasp buzzes around her again, clumsily prods her forehead close to her hairline. She almost wishes it would sting. Like a dark, underground stream, the vaguest, most terrifying feeling meanders through her: something has gone terribly wrong. When that great steamship foundered, it took the ordinary world, and all that is safe and reliable, with it. Now she views the world through a distorting mirror. Heroism has turned to treachery. Brave strong men, like her father, have become obsequious.
The park comes into view and Mother takes her hand. A rush of pity and regret floods Miranda. She looks up at this elegant woman with her high cheekbones and her proud air and knows she didn’t mean to betray Father. It’s all a terrible mistake. The wasp touches down on her wrist then flies off as Mother and she stand upon the curb, waiting for a motor car to pass. As she remembers the collage she had made of the newspaper article, a new emotion begins to rumble within Miranda; it’s a stark and fire-spitting feeling, and she no longer pities the Ismay girls. She’s on her mother’s side, this time, fending off the snakes. Something loosed evil upon the world that spring, and it wasn’t Mother. Leaves skitter along the road and the name they whisper changes from Johnston to Ismay as they cross to the rolling trees and the dappled sunlight of the park.
The worst kind of villain is one who makes good people act against their own judgment. It was Ismay’s ship; Ismay, whom her father seemed to look up to in that strange, silent way of his; Ismay who shattered Mother’s notions of good and evil; and Ismay who should be made to pay for it all. She thinks of her father’s study, his black leather-bound address book, his stamps, and with a small flutter in her chest, sets her plan in motion.
MIRANDA SEES SOMETHING BEYOND the palm, and this time there is a conclusive air about the movement. Mr. Ismay comes around the table and puts a thin shawl around his daughter’s shoulders. Evelyn stands and straightaway turns to leave, but Mr. Ismay waits for a moment and looks in Miranda’s direction.
She’s too numbed to notice properly at first; the illusion has returned that she’s at the theatre, and therefore beyond being seen. But he holds her gaze until she glances away, then back again. Her face gives a slight twitch of apology. While she has no idea what this expression might look like, something about the way Mr. Ismay meets her gaze once again seems to acknowledge this. He turns and follows his daughter.
Miranda is left alone with Father, Graham, and Mother. The talk now is of the best curtains and light fittings, about Harrods, and Fortnum and Mason’s, and the horrors of modern department stores with their low prices but dubious goods. Miranda thinks of breaking in but knows it’s far too late. Mother’s eyes are lively, reflecting the chandeliers now, basking in the gentle breeze. This time, Miranda realizes, it is curiosity rather than annoyance that was behind her instinct to interrupt. She’s too defeated to try to rebuild the defensive wall.
There have never been any relatives on Mother’s side, or any long-term friends who might have known her in childhood, who might have shed light on her extraordinary perseverance when it comes to upholding all that is correct in taste and conduct. Yet it has been quite relentless, and she can right herself in minutes and steam ahead as she has done tonight after any argument or unpleasantness. Even her breach of the basic vows of fidelity—the veiled threat of discovery tonight—can’t bow her indomitable spirit. It’s possible Father has remained ignorant about it all these years—although he does manifest a rather pointed dislike of his wife at times, which makes Miranda wonder—but Mother herself has always seemed quite untroubled by the subject of Mr. Johnston, even laughs in a rather shrill and overly public manner at pleasantries still written on Christmas cards, which are addressed, rather revealingly, only to Mother.
Somehow the notion of greater advancement, her family’s place in the social sphere, must, for Mother, transcend any parochial objections. The values are as baffling as they are distorted, but the sheer stoicism of it all astonishes Miranda. In recent years, Miranda has seen her mother as something grand, powerful yet flawed; one of the great steamships of the past transformed and personified. But suddenly she seems altogether harsher, more enduring, and at heart, chillingly cold.
Since she became an adult, capable of arguing, Miranda has merely taken the opposite view as a reaction and has never learned a thing about what lies inside her mother. She remembers the heated discussions of late— The world is changing, Mother. Classes are merging. The wealthy are being taxed. And most of them give in with a grumble or two and admit it. Even if you are close to the top of the sinking pyramid, you must realize it’s disappearing— and realizes her words were as inert as printed letters on a page. What was there in any of it to provoke a reaction? Where was the engagement? Now, for the first time, as she watches the inexhaustible stars in Mother’s eyes, the glint of light upon the gold earring chains, the dark pools of onyx sewn into her mint green dress, she sees her mother as a genuine mystery. She wonders what it might be like to ask a simple, open-ended question of the kind she complains her fiancé avoids. Such a question, calculated for greatest surprise, gathers on her lips: Mother, why is any of this important?
A pause opens up and Miranda is within a whisker of speaking.
“Graham, ” Mother announces, “you must get Miranda to hire a lady’s maid.”
Miranda gulps down the question, bites her lip.
Mother glides on, sparkling into the night, and the moment passes.
acknowledgements
I would like to thank Garry Cranford and Jerry Cranford for their enthusiasm for this novel and everyone at Flanker Press, including publicist Laura Cameron, for their attention to this book. For this story I was particularly lucky with editors and would like to thank Marnie Parsons for her expert care and attention to detail, and Annamarie Beckel for her wise and subtle judgment. As always, I would like to thank Maura, my wonderful wife and partner, and my joyful little daughter, Jemma.
PAUL BUTLER is the author of several critically acclaimed novels, including Cupids, Hero, 1892, NaGeira, Easton’s Gold, Easton, and Stoker’s Shadow. His work has appeared on the judges’ lists for Canada Reads and the Relit Longlist for three consecutive years, and he was a winner in the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador Arts and Letters Awards four times between 2003 and 2008, when he retired from the competition to be literary representative, and then chair, of the Arts and Letters Committee. A graduate of Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre, Butler has written for the Globe and Mail, The Beaver, Books in Canada, Atlantic Books Today, and Canadian Geographic, and has also contributed to CBC Radio, local and national. He lives in St. John’s. His website is www.paulbutlernovelist.com.
Easton’s Gold
“. . . Butler builds solid suspense and healthy narrative momentum through a focus on fundamentals: efficient storytelling, keen attention to characterization and fealty to the mysteries of the past and their influence on the present . . . a compelling novel which often surprises and satisfies.”—THE GLOBE AND MAIL
“Butler is an invigorating writer, keeping the reader in suspense, but moving the story along at an exhilarating pace. . . . And finally, Butler is a fine stylist, one who knows how to provide apt images that vivify thought and action.”—CANADIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL
“Easton’s Gold and its predecessor [Easton] are about as different as it’s possible for two novels featuring the same character to be. They’re both excellent, but in very different ways.” — THE CHRONICLE HERALD
Cupids
“Butler does a good job of bringing out that ‘unstated drama’ in Cupids . . . [providing] enough detail to give you a sense of life in the 1600s. . . . Another of his strengths as a writer is an ability to quickly create a picture of a character, one that stays with you.”
THE CHRONICLE HERALD
Easton
“The story is fast-paced, action-packed, and replete with horrific details, frequent tests of will, a somewhat improbable love match, and a satisfying denouement.”
CANADIAN BOOK REVIEW ANNUAL
“[Easton] is exceptionally well-written.... Throughout the novel, the atmosphere of threatening danger that permeates the story will hold the reader spellbound until the end.”—THE TELEGRAM
1892
“[1892] is a page turner that will be enjoyed as romance, historical fiction and a chilling gothic tale.”
ATLANTIC BOOKS TODAY
“[Paul Butler’s] writing is lyrical and compelling.”
THE SUDBURY STAR
“Beautifully written . . .”
BOOK-A-RAMA
“[Paul Butler’s] descriptions of how people find themselves in old St. John’s are persuasive and compelling.”
RESOURCE LINKS
Paul Butler, Titanic Ashes
