Titanic Ashes, page 5
Evelyn catches the furtive beginnings of a turn from Miranda Grimsden, suspects she may be on the verge of slinking away, and knows that, to prevent her mission from descending into futility and cowardice, she must do or say something, and quickly.
“Miranda Grimsden, ” she says. Punctuated by the resonant blop, blop of water from the stalls behind them, Evelyn’s words seem to have emerged without much effort from some dreamy netherworld. The tone is commonplace, rich in the echoing chamber of the room, a touch disparaging perhaps but not particularly accusing. Still, she can feel the unnatural stillness beside her as she replaces the mascara and roots aimlessly through the contents of her purse with her fingertips. She has, at least, prevented Miranda’s escape.
“Yes.”
The answer is an odd surprise, almost startling in fact.
“So, ” she says, having no idea at all how to continue. Pantomime phrases push themselves into the front of her mind: We meet again; you thought you could escape me; we have ways of dealing with the likes of you. She’s suddenly aware of the absurdity of following Miranda Grimsden to the bathroom. They are no longer children, yet the only logical reason for a confrontation would be to pressure the girl to disown the letter she wrote to her father thirteen years ago. What a shameful admission, that the ramblings of a ten-year-old invaded her family to such an extent! Her face, still locked upon her own reflection, burns at the thought. Thankfully the redness does not show through the wash of blue light.
“I heard your mother, ” she merely says, taking herself by surprise again.
She hears an intake of air, and turns her head far enough to see Miranda’s arm frozen on her purse, her head down, her eyelids flickering.
“I thought you would, ” she says.
It takes a moment to register that this is not an apology—everything about it, the tone, and posture says that it is—and another moment to realize that she prefers this to the conventional ‘sorry.’ There’s anticipation as well as regret in I thought you would. It disarms Evelyn for a moment, and deflates her too. It is absurd to have followed Miranda Grimsden in here, the act of a nursery battle that takes upon itself an argument between parents, while the parents themselves remain oblivious and aloof. But there is a purpose. In the barren ground of this meaningless, aborted conflict her arguments are forming with perfect clarity and order. She is counting the fallacies that became accepted truth: her father did help with the lifeboats until his help was no longer needed or required; he took nobody’s space as the lifeboat was already being lowered; he asserted no pressure upon the captain to increase his speed—this was the most oft repeated and groundless of the accusations; her father had over and over again warned against early arrivals as an inconvenience to passengers and merchants alike, who must then scramble for either an extra night’s accommodations or a warehouse for goods at the last moment.
And Evelyn can tie these falsehoods together with the ribbon of an overarching truth, the reason for her father’s misrepresentation. Once a man slips into the role of a scapegoat, grief, infamy, and distortion will conspire to weave every strand of evil intent from his supposed actions. There is simply too much stray, unhappy energy for it to be otherwise. It all has to find a home somewhere and J. Bruce Ismay was the home.
All of these arguments could now easily be unburdened as she and Miranda Grimsden stand before the mirrors, clicking and unclicking their purses and compacts, raising and lowering lipsticks and mascara brushes with the music of dripping water around them. The sparse but telling communication between them thus far has convinced Evelyn that the Grimsden girl would merely listen and acquiesce. But what would be the point? The enemy is elsewhere, carelessly and confidently sitting in the dining room, saying what she pleases to whomever’s ears can be reached.
Sensing the Grimsden girl shift—a slow, bovine movement from her shoulders as she picks up her purse— Evelyn burns with fresh shame and annoyance. Her imagined eloquence, she knows, has merely been lured forward by the timidity of her supposed opponent. If she confronted the woman, Miranda’s mother, who has had the boldness to gather all the vindictiveness levelled at Father into that single sentence, she would be reduced to grunts and blows.
Evelyn turns, following the circle Miranda makes around her, a noiseless inner growl her only comfort. The attendant skips ahead to open the door. But just as it seems Miranda will make a faceless retreat and disappear, she stops, turns fully toward Evelyn for the first time, forearm protectively across her belly, hand fidgety upon the opposite elbow.
“I’m sorry about it, really, ” she says, apparently sincere in a glib and sulky way. “But there’s nothing to be done with Mother.” Then she colours as though realizing something, looks away and then back again. “Sorry about the letter too. I wasn’t really in my right mind, I suppose. You can tell your father that.” She does turn finally now, stooping as she makes her way through the door which the attendant has kept open for her. The attendant, a dark-haired woman of about thirty, closes the door and remains where she is, towel still over her forearm. Her eyes flicker, avoiding Evelyn’s gaze.
chapter six
THE LIGHTNESS AROUND HER shoulders, as Miranda makes her way back to her seat, feels like euphoria, the heady, exhausted kind experienced at a funeral when the departed has been ill and bed-ridden for many years. But there’s an undeniable jingle to it, a flighty, feather-swift quickening of the pulse in time to the ragtime rhythm of the band, a timorous excitement at the flutter of a lady’s fan as she passes. Free at last, she thinks, and inwardly she congratulates herself.
All evening, since spying Mr. Ismay, she has been too afraid to leave her seat, but her mother’s declaration made hiding impossible. There was suddenly only one course she could take. She must draw out the accuser and get it all over with. And what surprised her most was the sudden thrill of the idea, nestling within the terror like an exquisite blossom within a pile of broken glass. If she could get through a confrontation, if she could outface her younger self, disown it with some kind of apology, some sign of recompense, it would be like eradicating a poison that has sapped her strength for so long she can barely remember life as it was before.
She knew she would be followed. She understood the subtle transfer of energies that existed in public spaces— who noticed whom, who was drawn to whom—and assumed it must be something in her blood, a trait she had inherited from Mother. Actors and actresses understood people, had a sense of the magnetic-like forces that commanded attention and spurred excitement. There was something inherently dishonest, even cowardly, about the retreat designed to draw forth a pursuer and give oneself the opportunity to relent. And the moment the Ismay girl came through the bathroom door, shimmering ivory dress bluish in the bathroom light, she felt both ashamed of the device and excited by the power of her own instinct. It was a courtship of a kind, an ancient pattern known in classical and medieval rhymes, the hunter disguising herself as the hunted, and she partly despised herself for it even while she basked in the relief of her success.
Miranda catches sight of her mother, whose eyes shine with that strange guarded pleasure as she speaks to her prospective son-in-law, and suddenly wonders what else she might have inherited from her. Miranda knows herself to be quite unlike her mother in the more obvious ways, reticent in company while her mother seems formidable, boyish and sober in dress while her mother veers toward the flamboyant and feminine. Tonight, only, Miranda has made an exception with silken green, a compliment of sorts to her mother’s mint green sewn with onyx gemstones. Though her dress is plainer than her mother’s garb, she rather regrets even this much compromise as it draws more eyes than she is used to.
The differences between mother and daughter are notable enough, Miranda thinks. But a shudder of fear moves through her as she sits, catching her mother’s inevitable half-questioning, potentially disapproving glance, and shrinks under its influence. She is, and always has been, terrified of the woman known to the outside world as Agnes Grimsden, has always personified her as an awaiting catastrophe. The sparkle of gold, diamond, and pearl seems uncannily akin to the carefully arranged glasses and dinnerware on board the Titanic itself; she imagines the dreadful buckling, twisting, smashing sounds building to a cacophony were her mother to tip from her chair and slip to the ground.
But her mother is only part of Miranda’s terror. It’s also the manifold similarities between them that might be hidden beneath the surface. Shyness is not a character trait; it’s merely an absence of words in a given situation. If one were to remove her inhibitions, who is to say what other differences might evaporate? Dressing boyishly, for instance, is as much the fashion today as adornments were in Mother’s era. She shares her mother’s frightening ability to read people, to know what will lure them, and what scares and depresses them. And when Miranda did act that one time against the Ismays, it was her idea, not her mother’s, even though the sentiments may have been borrowed from her parent.
Even while Miranda tries to seek refuge in Graham’s mildly concerned smile, her mother tries to hold her gaze, and she realizes another reason why her fear might be peaking. She’s committed an act of betrayal.
Her eyes duck to her plate, back to Graham, avoiding Mother’s for the moment while she runs through her own words to Evelyn Ismay and their implications. There’s nothing to be done with Mother. She imagines her mother hearing the words as she spoke them, imagines her scooping straight into her own recent memory of the event, reading her thoughts. How profoundly unsayable the simple sentence seems now, like an obscene gesture made against a cathedral altar during the quietest hush of a service.
Loyalty to family, and particularly to Mother, has always been extreme. And Miranda feels it not as some shackle foisted upon her, but rather as a part of her, a muscle at the core of her heart responding to the urgent need for life-giving blood. She remembers the freezing deck once more, feels her mother’s protective power in the bristling fur of her coat, a great mother bear protecting her young, towering proudly as she eases Miranda forward from the high lip of the great ship onto the lifeboat suspended a terrifying distance from the water.
“Don’t look down, Miranda. Look straight ahead.” Her hands were warm and protective on Miranda’s shoulders as she moved onto the lifeboat. “Make room for my daughter, please, ” Mother’s voice warns, and a space opens before her, hands reaching up to steady her onto a low seat. Mother stands for a moment, dignified, unafraid, and then settles beside her. Miranda gazes back onto the deck as men scuttle around, their shoes shining under the deck lights, trousers comically flaring as they bend and crouch and turn the clanking iron wheel of the lifeboat support. The boat deck is no longer level, and even Miranda knows this can’t be right. For something as huge as the Titanic to tilt even a little is like the moon disappearing from the heavens on a cloudless night. It can mean nothing good. She sees the concentration in the face of one of the sailors, a blue vein running along his forehead as he turns the crank, eyes moist with the cold, staring straight ahead. She wonders about him, whether he is thinking of himself, his family back home. Perhaps he has a daughter too. When her thoughts stray onto her father, she’s hit by a wave of emotion so painful she can hardly bear it. She sees him at the Ismay dinner table, deferring in that odd, quiet way of his—a combination of tight-lipped northern pride and cow-eyed need for approval— remembers the twinkle appearing in his eye as Mr. Ismay talked of the luxury of the liner upon which Miranda and her mother were booked.
“They’ll be travelling first class, of course, ” Father told Mr. Ismay, his voice slightly defensive, fingers creeping into his waistcoat pocket.
“Of course, ” said Mr. Ismay, his voice soft, reassuring, as though humouring a child.
Father sniffed, nodding.
Her father’s vulnerability was poignant, saddening even to the nine-year-old Miranda. How dreadful, how unendurable it would be, she thought, to see him upon the deck with the other fathers and husbands—some waving handkerchiefs jokingly, others pensive, one or two smiling sadly then suddenly looking away—as the lifeboat jolts downwards, the deck slipping away.
“Women and children only, ” yells an officer now out of sight, and Miranda hears footsteps scuttling along the deck to the next available lifeboat.
MIRANDA LOOKS AT HER father now, remembering, watches him take a sip of water then go back to his meat, his thoughts no doubt far from the table, at the office, thinking of exports at one of the factories, thinking of new equipment or productivity. Gratitude for his safety comes over her shoulders like a warm blanket, but she feels a prickle and shiver of breeze too.
On the other side of the palm, Evelyn returns to her table. Miranda catches sight of her swooping ivory dress from beyond the palm. She glimpses the smile too, warm, generous, purposeful. Mr. Ismay looks up and smiles too, a touch nervously perhaps, the ghost of a question in his eyes.
If I still feel protective toward my own father after all this time, Miranda thinks, how must Evelyn Ismay feel? Would she really be satisfied? An answer comes back straightaway: of course not. One perfunctory and very late unburdening of guilt; how could it satisfy anybody?
Mother laughs at something Graham has said, something Miranda didn’t catch. Miranda locks eyes with her for a moment. The feeling she is a traitor returns and, along with the guilt, a kind of twisted satisfaction. Mother’s laugh was the forced yet luxuriating kind that can’t help but draw attention from other tables. Miranda realizes how effectively her own words to Evelyn have reinforced Mother as the target. And something about Evelyn’s movements as she returned to her father’s table, something about her smile too, suggests unfinished business.
chapter seven
THERE’S SOMETHING IN EVELYN’S smile, a quality profoundly warm and caring and focused on his welfare, which makes Ismay feel very old. He can’t place exactly when the balance tipped, making his children protectors and himself the one to be looked after, but suspects it was a slow reaction to events thirteen years ago, that the change was set in motion then, and the vision he has just seen—healthy young woman, soft lines of anxiety hidden beneath an indulgent smile—carries the tingling certainty of a premonition.
He sees himself in the not-so-distant future: an old man with a tartan blanket over his legs. He gazes absently at a bed of tulips as someone in a nurse’s uniform wheels him along the gravel path. The windows of a high-walled institution stare coldly down upon them, ivy trailing along the bricks and toward the ledges. Evelyn herself might be a nurse walking toward them with a tray, bottle, and spoon.
“There, there, Mr. Ismay. Your medicine.”
He would like to fight against all this but knows there will soon come a point in life where the battle will be beyond him. The shields, swords, and banners of real life are already passing from his grasp. And, since 1912, it always was too private a battle to share. He has been the aging warrior who will not compromise his position of sole leader in the attack. The change, when it becomes apparent to the outside world, will be a sudden one. One moment he will outstare his foe, the next he will be in the mud, his arthritic hand twitching some way from his bayonet.
He examines Evelyn’s face as she smiles once more and settles into her seat. A more immediate worry does, at least, subside. Evelyn was always a person of poise, a sensible person, but for thirteen years he has lived in dread that a child of his may one day be drawn into some unnamable conflict of shrieks and blows on his behalf. When he noticed that Evelyn was leaving the table on the heels of Miranda Grimsden, a twinge of suspicion went through him. The timing might be more than coincidence. Then, as he sat alone, watching Evelyn’s shimmering form move around the tables toward the ladies’ cloakroom, the rolling power of a nightmare descended.
In recent years he has struggled with the same night terror, not exactly a dream as he is never fully asleep when it occurs; but an imagined scene that leaves the aftertaste of nightmare, the same acrid breath: Tom, Margaret, Evelyn and young George as they were when children—George in a sailor suit, gollywog in his hand, the girls in the white pinafores and ribbons they used to wear to church—huddle together in a rocking lifeboat. Nothing else is visible but the moving ripples of moonlight illuminating the boat’s planking and the folds of the girls’ dresses. But there is a distant sound, first a few, faint falling cries, like seagulls far away. Then the sound grows as though from a large gathering flock. The children huddle closer to each other, and Margaret stares over the rim of the boat. The cries continue to multiply and draw nearer; and then he can hear distinctly human syllables: or, ard, tray, or cow, tray. Each time he strains to make them out. And then he catches them. “Traitor! Coward!” And they repeat and grow louder, circling the lifeboat. He waits for hands to grip the deck rail, but however loud the cries, this never happens, and the boat never moves beyond the gentlest of sways.
Each time he hears the voices, it is like the first time, even though the scene has been played out many times before. And though he knows it is he who has earned the accusations, he knows also that the voices do not care; his children are his heirs and, as such, are held responsible for his crimes.
Ismay returns his daughter’s smile, trying to remember whether this waking dream visited him last night. He decides it must have done; it seems so vivid he can almost feel the tip of the lifeboat bottom beneath his chair, can almost see the band of moonlight rippling over Evelyn’s dress.
“Will you miss London when you go back, Father?”
Evelyn takes a sip of wine and waits for the answer. Ismay recognizes a friendly duplicity in the question, a need to get him thinking beyond this time and place—the restaurant, the Grimsdens, being recognized, business matters that still require him to come into the London office from time to time.
