Titanic Ashes, page 3
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.
He feels annoyance rising to anger, but falling just as quickly to nothing. How could he really expect anything different? The Titanic is, after all, the knot at the centre of all their lives. She hasn’t named the event, poor girl. She doesn’t need to.
Evelyn, he suspects, was hoping to keep their conversation this evening to the subject of Basil Sanderson. Ismay knows Evelyn and Basil plan to marry. He knows also that his own approval would mean a great deal to her, but that she is looking for far more than a consent he has already implicitly given. Some kind of dynastic sentiment among his family, touchingly ancient and impractical, longs for healing through marriage lines. With Basil, the White Star Line’s likely future chairman, and Evelyn, the house of Ismay would once again be realigned with its proud maritime heritage. Through this plan—and Ismay has no doubt all the appropriate bonds of affection and love came before the other serendipitous aspects of the match—Evelyn and perhaps Julia and Margaret expect a great balm to be applied to the disgrace suffered by himself and the family. In short, they expect it to make him better again.
Ismay tries to greet his daughter’s question with an amused smile. “My dear, I am enjoying myself immensely.” The sentiment, coming with a genuine-sounding surprise, almost convinces even him. Evelyn sighs gently and smilingly raises her eyebrows. It’s the expression of a teacher who has just failed to catch her pupil in the act. They both know of the misdemeanor, the look says, but as it cannot be proven she will drop the matter. Ismay smiles once more, is about to drop his gaze to his plate, when something—an exclamation, a flitting shadow and the clink of glass—makes him turn first to the Palm Room entrance, then to the opposite end of the hall, where there are fresh shrieks and gasps. Evelyn cranes her neck too, catching his eye, questioning. More diners react, looking upward, it seems. Cutlery clinks. The band stops playing. Laughter comes in a wave and a waiter positions himself, silver tray dangling from his hand as though for a catch on the rugby field. All heads turn again in unison, and Ismay, trying to follow the cause of the interest, catches the flick of wings overhead, the darting brown body of a sparrow as it sinks into the foliage of the palm tree closest to them. Some of the men are now on their feet. Three or four waiters converge, hovering uncertainly as they come close to the palm. One claps his hands; the man with the tray waves at the bird with his gloved free hand like a policeman directing traffic.
Ismay realizes he must have shifted his own seat. His view through the palm has changed. Without any obvious cover of leaf or stem he finds himself staring directly into the small, dark eyes of Mrs. Grimsden.
She makes no sign of recognition at first, and neither does he, but the blankness of expression carries a full awareness, even a kind of static acknowledgment, of the situation and the history. Gradually something changes. As the waiters converge gingerly upon the palm and the bandleader counts his musicians off to start again, Ismay neglects to take his eyes from Mrs. Grimsden, not from any desire to face her down, but simply through an inability to think where else he ought to put his own gaze. Her eyes narrow further, and her mouth seems to harden.
If, before this evening, someone had told Ismay that a woman could take ‘a violent sip of water’ he would have told them such an action made no sense, that they were colouring the movements they witnessed with their own fears and prejudices. But this is the only description that aptly conveys the way Mrs. Grimsden now jerks the drink to her lips, tips back her head and returns the glass to the table, her hand still clutching its stem. Still he doesn’t look away, this time for a different set of reasons: for one thing he can’t; her behaviour is both bewildering and fascinating, so much apparent emotion, such need to express corseted tightly within the constraints of an entirely public setting. Only by forcing malignity into her face and imbuing the most commonplace of movements with a kind of frantic energy can she hope to convey the true level of her indignation. The effect seems vaguely comic, especially with the band now recommencing its program with a jaunty, fast-tempo number. Indeed it would be comic, worthy of a scene from a Charlie Chaplin film, if only he were not himself the object of her anger.
He knows what she wants, and does not believe in being pointlessly bullheaded. But to look away now would be giving away something he has yet to concede, although he has been under far greater pressure than this. It would be saying, Yes, I am a coward and I am ashamed. You have every right to stare and judge. Even now, after the great trauma of the Titanic and the weight of judgment that came down upon him in its wake, he has done himself the service not to buckle in this regard. It is a habit with him now. He will stand his ground until the moment he drops.
His daughter’s hand comes upon his arm, compelling him to tear his gaze away at last. She leans across the table with a kind of appeal in her eyes. Of course, he thinks, she has seen the Grimsdens, has likely been aware of their presence all this time, hence the solicitous manner, the open, yet leading, questions— “What are you thinking about now? Don’t you think you deserve to just enjoy yourself without brooding about things?” He would like to tell her it doesn’t matter, that he also has been aware of them all evening, except of course, that it does matter, clearly, and he would never say anything of the kind to his daughter even if it were true. Never have the Ismays talked openly about anything to do with the accusation of cowardice levelled against Ismay after the Titanic, nor even about the effect such accusations have had upon him.
Evelyn’s eyes are moist, but she is smiling—a fluid, desperate smile.
“Don’t worry, Father, ” she says, turning her eyes pointedly upward toward the chandelier, almost magically drawing his own in the same direction. The sparrow darts one way, then the other, causing the crystal to tingle. “They won’t hurt it, ” she says. They watch together as the bird switches direction again, circling the ceiling fan, then dips, making a young lady duck and shriek with delight. With a flick of the wings it then flies straight as a bullet toward the foyer. The diners break into spontaneous laughter and applause. The waiters still encircling the palm look suddenly redundant and sheepish at the clamor, as though left on stage to receive praise that belongs to another. Evelyn claps, eyes twinkling at her father. Ismay joins in, feeling a genuine kind of relaxation with his laughter, but knowing with that dim instinct for trouble he has always possessed that the relief will not last.
chapter four
MIRANDA MUST HAVE BEEN the only diner in the room not following the course of the sparrow as it flitted around the palm and circled the chandelier. She fixed her stare first at her own fingers on the stem of her glass, then turned to the ornate entrance with the Grecian-looking plants trailing over the gilding, then at a mirror on the far wall, anywhere but at the wretched bird which hovered and ducked between them and J. Bruce Ismay.
Even with her best efforts to try and distract herself, the spellbound faces of the diners and waiters told her where the sparrow was. She could guess at the sight which must have revealed itself to her mother, explaining her ominous change of expression. She took her eyes from the far mirror, glanced at Mother and saw her eyes darken. In spite of herself, Miranda tilted her head far enough to allow her peripheral vision to scan the Ismays’ table. There was one person opposite, a young woman in an ivory silk dress. This could only be one of the daughters who had been so nice to her when she and her parents had visited them in Mossley Hill. She now takes a second peek at the dark hair, angular features, and decides it must be Evelyn, the younger of the two, much more grown up than she was at the time, but nearer to being her contemporary all the same.
She could never remember the details, or even much about the event, but the kindness and the fuss, the easy acceptance into the world of older girls had stayed with her. Like a flower in glass, the day was a timeless record of a specific youthful vision; it was her child’s conception of the shining adult or near-adult world to which she would one day belong. Everything was felt intensely by Miranda in those days; she categorized events and people as fragments of paradise or of hell. Life as it was, with its long creaking silences in church or in the classroom, was most often dull, belonging decisively to the latter column; the future, however, offered glimpses of something different, a thousand forbidden, sparkling tales, the details of which were always obscure.
