The Midnight Watch (34 page)

At last Captain Lord answers. ‘When?’ he says. ‘When? I never knew anything about these rockets until seven o’clock the next morning.’

It is forthright, but it is not an answer to the question, and Isaacs knows it is not honest. He has read the witness proofs: he knows that chief officer Stewart told Captain Lord of the rockets when he woke him at half past four in the morning; he knows too that Herbert Stone told him of them much earlier.

But Isaacs says nothing. He waits. He has the measure of the man; he knows he will correct himself.

‘Wait,’ the captain says, ‘I did hear of one rocket.’

‘And did you remain in the chartroom when you were told that vessel was firing a rocket?’

‘I remained in the chartroom when he told me this vessel had fired a rocket.’

The captain seems to think this an answer of clarity and courage, but for Isaacs it is perplexing and unfathomable. ‘I do not understand you,’ he says, with the tone of a man used to understanding things. He pauses. He seems, almost, to slouch. Onlookers in the galleries think he has given up. He turns away from his notes, away from the witness, and stares hard into the lofty ceiling for inspiration. ‘You knew, of course, there was danger to steamers in this field of ice?’

‘To a steamer steaming, yes.’

Isaacs turns his gaze back to the witness and raises his eyebrows. ‘I do not understand,’ he says again. ‘It may be my fault.’ He starts from the beginning once more. ‘What did you think this vessel was firing rockets for?’

‘I asked the second officer,’ Lord replies, emphasising each word as if explaining a complex maritime idea to a landlubber. ‘I said, “Is that a company signal?” and he said he did not know.’

Isaacs thinks again how that is not an answer to his question. ‘Then that did not satisfy you?’

‘No, it did not.’

Isaacs sits down. In the ladies’ gallery there is accord: he
has
given up. There is an extended silence. The machinery of the inquiry seems to have temporarily seized, until eventually the Commissioner himself takes up the questioning. He starts exactly where Isaacs had.

‘What did you think the rocket was sent up for?’

‘Well, we had been trying to communicate with this steamer by Morse lamp from half past eleven, and she would not reply.’

Again, it is not an answer. Lord Mersey puts the question a fourth time. ‘What did you think she was sending up a rocket
for
?’

‘I thought it was acknowledging our signals, our Morse lamp. A good many steamers do not use the Morse lamp.’

It is an answer but it is not credible. ‘Have you ever said that before?’

‘That has been my story right through.’

Lord Mersey does not believe him. Nowhere in his proofs of evidence does it say that rockets are used to answer Morse lamps. And Isaacs, who knows the sea, does not believe him either, because he is rising from his chair, slowly, like a cobra. His balance is perfect, his voice lilts and floats, he achieves a seesawing rhythm between question and answer, as if in a courtly dance.

‘If it was not a company signal, must it not have been a distress signal?’

‘If it had been a distress signal the officer on watch would have told me.’

‘
I say again
: if it was not a company signal, must it not have been a distress signal?’

‘Well, I do not know of any other signals but distress signals that are used at sea.’

‘You have told me already, some few minutes ago, that you were not satisfied it was a company signal. You did not think it was a company signal?’

‘I inquired,
was it
a company signal.’

‘But you had been told that he did not know?’

‘He said he did not know.’

‘Very well. That did not satisfy you?’

‘It did not satisfy me.’

‘Then if it was not that, it might have been a distress signal?’

There is a silence. The courtly dance has come to a stop. Isaacs looks down at his notes and waits. Lord is so still he seems not to be breathing. Then, at last, he speaks.

‘It might have been.’

At the back of the hall someone can be heard gently sobbing.

‘And you remained in the chartroom?’ presses Isaacs.

‘I remained in the chartroom.’

The light climbs higher in the tall windows and the hall fills with a lazy warmth. Fifty lawyers, twenty clergyman, sixty pressmen and hundreds of ladies and gentlemen in the public galleries stare in wonder at this tall, straight-backed man. They begin to see him not in his civilian suit behind a bare and spindly desk, but in his square bridge-blazer with its polished brass buttons and its sleeve-ends dipped in gold, sitting in his cabin at the very centre of his ship. They see him talking to the second officer above about rockets exploding silently in the dark night, rockets which
might have been
distress signals. They see him
remaining in his chartroom
, not seeing the rockets, and not hearing, either, the sharp tolls of the bridge bell ringing out the hours of the midnight watch, loud and clear and pure.

The sixth rocket

Stella rushes back down the Grand Staircase for the second time, knowing she cannot rely on her father. She’s the parent now, and must lead him and her brothers up to the boat deck, encouraging them all the way. I have a special strength, she says to herself, that my father needs.

And she must get them into a lifeboat, of that she is now certain. She has seen the black sea rising towards the forward welldeck and now, inside the ship, she can see green water swirling at the bottom of the Grand Staircase.

The ship is sinking.

She runs along first-class corridors, pushing through little knots of passengers with her broad shoulders, not caring about upsetting rich people. She ignores a group of third-class girls walking the other way – friends she’s made during the voyage, who beg her to turn around and come with them to the boat deck. She strides straight through a crowd of young men on the aft welldeck who whistle at her as she passes, and slips by Mr Kieran and his thuggish helpers when they try to stop her at the top of the stairs. But when she gets to the third-class entrance foyer it’s almost empty. She cannot see her father or her brothers. Their luggage, too, has gone.

She calls out for them, describes them to the few remaining people, opens doors and looks down alleyways. No one remembers seeing them leave the foyer. Stella runs back up the stairs and asks Mr Kieran whether he’s seen them. He says he has not.

‘You should have let them come up with us!’ she says. ‘You lied to us. They
are
letting men into the boats.’

Mr Kieran shrugs his shoulders, smiles, and tells her she ought to beware of becoming hysterical. Stella says that he ought to beware of being thrown overboard.

She searches the third-class common room, a large, open space in the raised stern housing, where at least a hundred people are gathered, mostly women. There are babies and toddlers too, with drooping eyelids. Stella wonders why they are still here. She can see ten, twenty, thirty children. And where are the men? The ship’s bow must now be completely under water, and hundreds of men slept there. Where are her father and brothers?

Now she remembers something that chills her: the comment a steward made to her father as they waited in the reception foyer. ‘Why not go down to the dining room on F deck?’ he’d said with a honey-like voice and cloying smile, ‘where it’s warmer and there’s more space?’

‘Surely not,’ Stella whispers. ‘Surely not.’

She runs back down the stairs to the foyer, through the starboard-side door to Scotland Road. At the forward end she can see seawater, but halfway along, the companionway down to F deck is still dry. She takes the stairs two at a time and pushes open the double doors of the dining room.

And this is where all the men are. The room – the largest third-class space on the ship – is filled with them. The warm air is thick with their smell; most would not have bathed since leaving England. How still and quiet they are, thinks Stella. They sit at tables or on piles of luggage; they stand in groups, smoke cigarettes and drink tea. Some are drying their clothes on the backs of chairs. But why are they here? Many of them are young and strong and if they rose up together nothing could stop them. Yet they’ve stayed in this room like animals waiting to be fed by their keeper.

But what most dismays her – and frightens her – are the people she sees on their knees, bowing their heads in prayer. There are two groups forward and one aft, being led by men in black gowns and high collars. Above the general murmur of the room she can hear their silly mutterings.

And there, in the aft group, are her father and brothers. Her father’s head is bowed low and close to the minister’s gown, like a child trying to hide in his mother’s skirt. Just behind him, George prays with his father, but Doug and Fred are looking about with nervous eyes. All of them, she notices, have taken off their lifejackets and placed them on the floor to kneel upon.

*   *   *

Herbert Stone had thought the captain, on being told about the rockets, would come at once to the bridge. Instead he asked about company signals. It was the first time that night – as Stone stood watching the steamer, and Morsing her, and sipping his coffee, and pacing the deck, and now, at last, talking to his captain – that the notion of company signals had entered his mind.

‘You were an onlooker, paying careful attention,’ Mr Butler Aspinall, KC puts to him in London, in that way barristers have of delivering profound truths in flat statements, ‘keeping those lights under observation, and then this question comes from the master. What do you think he meant by such a question?’

‘I do not know, except that he had the thought in his mind that they may have been company signals of some sort.’

Aspinall eyes him above his spectacles. ‘Was it in yours?’

Stone hesitates. ‘That they were company signals?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

Company signals were not in his mind, because he knows what company signals are: coloured flares or balls or Roman candles, used in complex patterns to indicate which company a ship belongs to. And he knows that what he saw were not these. He saw white rockets, pure and simple.

Aspinall presses the point. ‘You did not believe they were company signals?’

‘I had never seen company signals like them before.’

‘Then what did you think they were?’

‘I did not think what they were intended for; white rockets is what I saw them as.’

‘Wait. You did not think they were company signals?’

‘No.’

‘What did you think?’

‘I just thought they were white rockets. That is all.’

White rockets, that is all.
In the Drill Hall men and women turn sorrowful faces to each other.

But Stone has done his duty. He has told the captain and the captain has ordered him back to the Morse lamp. When he walks over to the tapper he’s calmer. He sends a message out into the night without making a single mistake: ‘We are the
Californian
stuck in ice who are you?’

He cannot make out a response. He sends again.

‘Who are you?’

There is flickering, which he tries to read, but Gibson is at last back, mumbling about how long it took to find the key to the store, and how the rotator for the patent log wasn’t where it was supposed to be, and how he was worried he’d wake the chief officer himself with all his clattering and banging.

Stone interrupts him. ‘That ship has been firing rockets. I’ve just told the captain.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She’s been firing rockets. The captain asked me to contact her with the lamp.’

Gibson takes up the binoculars and trains them on the ship. ‘She has a strange glare of light on her after deck,’ he says. ‘Heavens! I just saw a flash – on her deck.’

It’s another rocket. Stone watches the faint streak towards the sky and the burst of white stars. It’s the sixth he has seen, but it’s Gibson’s first.

‘You say you told the captain?’ the apprentice asks.

‘I told him.’

‘Shouldn’t he come up?’

‘He said to find out what she wants, and then you’re to go down and tell him.’ Stone feels Gibson’s eyes on him. ‘He thinks they might be company signals,’ he explains.

The apprentice looks baffled. ‘But it was a rocket.’

‘Yes.’

‘A
white
rocket.’

‘I know.’

Stone can hear the apprentice breathing and feel the warmth from his body. He senses a doubting, a mistrust. ‘You have a go at Morsing her,’ he says. ‘Try to get her.’

Gibson moves to the lamp tapper and Stone lifts the binoculars tight to his eyes. The silence presses in.

The seventh rocket

‘We were
told
to come down here to wait,’ says Stella’s father. ‘Mr Kieran said a ship is coming to pick us all up and this is the best place to be.’

‘It is the very
worst
place,’ says Stella, surveying the hundreds of men crammed into the room. With the ever-increasing slope of the deck the floor creaks as if it’s being stretched on a rack. Stella half expects the polished boards to splinter. George stands close to his father while Fred and Doug look at her expectantly, holding their lifejackets limply at their side. Fred, sixteen, picked up some work this year as a bricklayer and Stella had marvelled at his broadening chest and thickening shoulders. But now he looks like he’s about to cry as he slips his hand gently into hers, just as he used to do when he was a small boy. ‘What are we going to do, Sis?’ he asks.

‘We
have
to go up,’ she says, pulling him towards the door.

‘No,’ says her father. ‘There’s a ship coming, we must wait here.’ He is a thin man; he has never stood still long enough to get fat. But now he won’t move.

Time is short. Stella, exasperated, persuades him to come with her to a porthole and look through it. Can he see a ship coming? she asks. Can he see anything at all? Her father, cupping his hands tight around his eyes to keep out the light of the dining room, admits that he sees only the black sky.