The Midnight Watch (30 page)
I dropped off my suitcase at a guesthouse in the village and then strolled north along the main road. I bore left at a junction, walked past a large stone church, and soon arrived at the low hills and white sand traps of the Wallasey golf course. There was a clubhouse of red brick with high, decorated gables, and inside the proprietor showed me to a lounge with a great vaulted ceiling and tall windows. There was no bar, but I was told I might order drinks by ringing a small bell that he handed me.
I sat at a secluded corner table and waited, ringing as often as I dared, until in the late afternoon I heard the laughter and talk of a group of golfers returning from their game. When they appeared in the lounge – well-fed men with stomachs straining at the buttons of colourful shirts – a waitress brought a round of ales to their table.
And there he was, off to one side, taller than the others, standing quietly in crisp white trousers and a red-check sweater. He did not see me. He stood while the others sat, and smoked his pipe while they drank. He said things from time to time, in that deep voice of his, but there was something wooden in his exchanges. He spoke of the weather, and made a joke about the state of the fairways, but the laughter of the men was strained. They responded to him with a studied politeness.
‘I play every Thursday,’ Lord had told me on the train to Washington. ‘For the game, you understand, not the social side.’ And true to his word, when the men rang their bell for a second round of ales, Lord did not stay. He took his leave and I quickly paid for my drinks and followed him.
Waiting outside was a woman I assumed to be his wife – tall, strong and severe – pushing a perambulator holding a large, round-faced boy. The boy looked to be three or four years old – too old, I thought, to be in a pram. Lord perhaps thought the same, because as soon as he’d embraced his wife he lifted the child out so that the boy might trot along with them as they walked. But the son did not walk for long. Even from a distance I could hear his complaining – there was a stone in his shoe, an insect in his hair – and eventually his mother lifted him back into the pram. There his whining continued, and his father strode ahead – to be out of earshot, I supposed.
Lord never once looked around. We walked for a mile or so: the main road back to Wallasey village, a road towards the east, a small path across a sports field. Soon enough, the Lords arrived at their home and opened the front door.
I thought about calling out to them before they disappeared inside, but there was no need. Mrs Lord unexpectedly turned and came towards me. A moment later she stood before me, a forbidding, corsetted woman in black. From her hat hung a heavy veil, which she now lifted.
‘My husband asks,’ she said without introduction or niceties, ‘whether you might, in the name of humanity and all that is honourable, see your way clear to leaving him alone.’
I was so surprised by her tone, her appearance and her formal syntax that I couldn’t think what to say. She waited.
‘I had hoped,’ I said at last, ‘to ask him a question.’
‘Why would he allow you to ask him questions when you pay no heed to his answers? You listen to that labourer from the engine room and you publish his lies, but you ignore what my husband says. Has he not suffered enough to satisfy you?’
‘It is not my wish to make him suffer.’
‘In which case, I ask again that you please leave him alone, because he suffers by your presence.’
Twenty yards or so behind her, the captain entirely ignored me. He jiggled his child’s pram, trying to free a wheel that had caught on the doorframe. The boy was still sitting in it, sniffling and grizzling. For a brief moment, in the half-light of the late sun, I saw the captain’s face. It showed the same straight lines and sharp angles I had seen in his chartroom, in the Senate chamber in Washington and in the Drill Hall in London, but it also showed something new. I tried to read it, but Mrs Lord had moved to block my view.
‘Doesn’t he suffer,’ I asked her, ‘by his own guilt?’
She stared at me as if I had uttered a profanity. ‘Guilt? You insist on misunderstanding things, Mr Steadman. There is no guilt to suffer. My husband has already taken steps to clear his name, and soon all this silliness will be behind him. You should look to your own soul. Search out the blackness there; find your own guilt for what you have done to us.’
‘Do you know,’ I asked, ‘that your husband seeks to blame his second officer for what happened?’
Mrs Lord’s expression hardened yet further: an attack on her husband was an attack on her. Her words came at me with cold contempt. ‘My husband has done all he can for that man.’
This angered me. I knew exactly what Captain Lord had done for his second officer, and none of it was noble. ‘But,’ I said before I could stop myself, ‘your husband did not do the one thing he should have done for that man, and that is come up to the bridge when he was called. That is what he should have done, and that is why I am here: to ask him why he didn’t. Please let me ask him: why didn’t he go up to the bridge when Mr Stone told him of the rockets? Or if you won’t allow me to speak to him, then let me ask you: why did your husband leave all those people for dead?’
There was a blur of movement, a stinging flash of burning on my cheek, a sharp intake of my own breath. Mrs Lord had struck me hard across the face with an open, ungloved hand. She stood perfectly still, locking her gaze to mine as if daring me to strike her back.
Perhaps I had deserved it. Perhaps Mrs Lord was right to say I should examine my own soul. Perhaps I’d sacrificed a good man’s livelihood and reputation only to enhance my own. But it did not take me long, as I stood face to face with Mrs Lord, to remind myself of the real reason why I’d done what I had. It wasn’t for my career, or my newspaper, or Herbert Stone – or even for the truth. It was in the service of those who died. Lord
should
have gone to them, and even the most loyal and determined of defences from his wife could not change that simple fact. In all this dreadful business, it was the one moral absolute.
The stinging on my cheek cooled. ‘Thank you, Mrs Lord, for your time,’ I said. ‘I shall take up no more of it. You may tell your husband I will not bother him again.’
Mrs Lord made no reply. Instead she drew down the veil of her hat over her face and walked to her husband, who waited for her at their house. They went inside and pulled the door closed behind them.
I knew I had lost my chance, that I would not be back, that Lord was gone from me forever. After all this time I had not got from him a confession or an explanation. Perhaps Sydney Buxton at the Board of Trade was right to laugh at my American naivety. Stanley Lord would never tell the truth.
* * *
Mrs Lord’s hard words made me more determined than ever to keep my promise to Herbert Stone’s wife. So on the evening of my return from Liscard, still smarting from Mrs Lord’s blow, and her words still sounding in my brain, I got to work. I arranged my papers on the narrow desk of my hotel room, drank whisky straight from the bottle, and tried to push through to new territory in my account of Stone and his motivations. I needed to give sympathetic colour to his answers in London.
But again I struggled. Late in the evening I turned to the pages of
Moby-Dick
for inspiration. I read for an hour, and then another. As I was putting the book aside I looked again at the photograph of the Sage family, which I’d been using as a bookmark. I passed the image to and fro behind the distorting glass of the whisky bottle, magnifying this face and then that. One by one the Sage children stared back at me: the young man on the horse, the children sitting on the wall, the others. I drifted into an indignant mood; I felt once more the wrong committed against these children who seemed to cry out to me from their flimsy photograph.
Then I heard Mrs Stone’s voice. ‘Remember,’ she said. ‘He knows their names. Every single one.’ And with the startling, revelatory clarity that whisky sometimes brings, I understood how to tell the story of Herbert Stone.
* * *
The transcript of the British inquiry was available for purchase from His Majesty’s Stationery Office, in the form of one slender paper volume for each day of the hearing, and the following morning I bought a complete set: thirty-six volumes, a thousand pages, twenty-six thousand questions. For a week I read the closely typed pages day and night, making notes in the margins and underlining sections with coloured pencils. I read much about navigation, lifeboats and icebergs, about Mr Ismay, the Astors and the Duff-Gordons, but I could find nothing about the Sages. Not one third-class passenger had been called to give evidence.
Nonetheless, as I read carefully the evidence of others –
Titanic
crew members, third-class stewards, first-class passengers – the Sages began slowly to emerge in my mind, like figures moving behind a screen. I drank whisky and let its warm spirit conjure scenes on the sinking ship as clearly as if I’d been there. And when I put pen to page my words at last flowed quickly and freely. I hardly slept.
‘Eight White Rockets’ appeared in a number of small journals on both sides of the Atlantic, was serialised in one newspaper, and received some warm reviews. One London commentator called it a ‘provocative piece’.
On the copy I sent to Mrs Stone I included a brief inscription: ‘
Now everyone will know their names.’
In mid-September, I received by post an envelope containing a short note. It was not a reply from Mrs Stone, but a message from my wife. There was no greeting, only a few words in pale blue ink on a white card: ‘I know who Stella and Will are. I mean, I know who they
really
are, and I see what you have done. Thank you.’
It was time for me to return to Boston.
AN ACCOUNT OF THE SEA TRAGEDY OF THE
TITANIC
AND THE SAGE FAMILY
By John Steadman, an American journalist
Dedicated to my wife Olive, my daughter Harriet, and my dear little boy. ‘There is a better way.’
The first rocket
The tremor is low and rumbling and does not last for long but it’s enough to wake Stella Sage, always a light sleeper. In the dark she can smell the closeness of her four youngest siblings. She wonders if her mother and sister in the cabin next door, and her father and three brothers hundreds of yards away in the ship’s bow, have felt the shudder too.
The family of eleven are on their way to Florida to start over. Nineteen-year-old Stella, a dressmaker who hadn’t wanted to make this voyage, tries to go back to sleep. But soon she hears footsteps outside the cabin door, and women calling to each other in a language she can’t understand. And now four-year-old Tom and seven-year-old Connie, head to toe in the bunk below hers, are awake, talking and giggling. ‘Go back to sleep, little ones,’ Stella whispers. ‘Be quiet now.’ The children fall silent. Stella lies awake and listens.
Something doesn’t seem right. The footsteps and voices outside have grown louder and there are new sounds – escaping steam, slamming doors. But what strikes her most is the lack of vibration from the engines. After five days of their gentle rhythm, the stillness is stark.
Now she notices something else: it is easier to roll over one way in her bunk than the other. The cabin is tilting. She gets up and turns on the light. All four children are awake now – Will, Ada, Connie and little Tom.
‘Get up,’ she tells them, ‘and get dressed. Don’t leave this cabin. Especially you, Willy-boy.’ Eleven-year-old Will is something of a wanderer. Stella throws a coat over her nightclothes, steps into the alleyway and knocks on the cabin next door. Her mother appears, half asleep; behind her, Dolly – fourteen years old and difficult – lies in her bunk. ‘There’s something wrong with the ship,’ Stella says. ‘We must get dressed and go up on deck.’
Her mother says they should wait in their cabins so they don’t miss Mr Hart, their steward, when he comes to tell them whatever it is that’s happening. Stella, never good at waiting, disagrees. She says she’ll find out herself what’s happening and be back in five minutes. Before her mother can stop her she is hurrying forward along the E-deck alleyway. There are other people wandering around, mostly women, but some men too, who have come up from the men’s quarters in the forward part of the ship.
At the third-class stairwell Stella finds a group of twenty or thirty people. Some are still in nightclothes, others are fully dressed and some have put on lifejackets. When Stella asks what’s wrong, people tell her different things: a lost propeller blade, an iceberg, a problem with the ship’s plumbing.
She runs further forward and looks down Scotland Road, a broad, white-walled alleyway that runs unimpeded the full length of the ship. It’s crowded with men and luggage, and stewards handing out lifejackets. The jackets are cumbersome things, large cork panels sewn into white canvas with tangled straps dangling low to the floor, and most of the men, already struggling with heavy luggage, don’t take them. So the stewards stack them instead in neat piles along the alleyway wall.