Titanic Ashes (6 page)

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 some
thing, 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.

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 protect
ing 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.

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.

“You know me, my dear, ” he replies, attempting a reassuring smile. “I’m happy where I am these days, pottering
about and whatnot. As long as your mother is with me
and my children can visit.”

“And will there be good hunting this autumn?” she
asks with a fake Irish accent and a touch of mischief in her
eye. It’s a relief, this return to her usual teasing form. Both
Evelyn and Margaret rib him, making out that since retiring he is trying on the new persona of an Irish country
squire.

“Let’s see what the local gamekeeper can rustle up!”

It’s not entirely without foundation. Ismay does hunt
occasionally in Connemara and likes it more than he
would have believed possible. There’s something reassuring about carrying a gun, its weight in his hands, solid,
reliable. He likes the fact that hunting requires him to
walk long distances, take the fresh air, and really notice
the breeze and the trees and the curves of the landscape.
Most of all he likes the ritual—the cleaning of the barrel,
the rod, the polishing of the butt, the endless talks with
staff, and the visitors who care little about his past.

The question almost rescues him, nearly puts him in
tune again with the swinging rhythm of the band. But just
as his spirits rise and his vision begins to scan the restaurant, he catches her eye again: Mrs. Grimsden lifting the
drink to her lips. She seems farther from him now, though
he knows it is physically impossible, an illusion brought
about by the shielding plant. Her stare carries not so much
indignation as before but rather reveals the colder side of
anger.

He’s reminded of something he’d almost forgotten, so
buried as it was in the many accusations labelled against
him—the “cheap brittle steel” of the
Titanic
hull plating,
his mad pursuit of profit at the expense of safety, the criminal reduction in lifeboat allocation, the panic he was
supposed to have displayed as the boats were lowered.
Though Mrs. Grimsden herself never testified at the
inquest, she was very friendly indeed with a lady who did.
She also had, he recalled, been part of the same conversations on board from which the witness drew her assumptions. He had read the transcript of her testimony so many
times he had it memorized.

No
, the witness kept repeating. She did not actually
hear
Mr. Ismay say they were trying for a speed record,
but it was the general impression he seemed to give, that
they intended to speed through the ice.

He’d said no such thing, of course, but the transcript
irked him. It was a thorn of injustice, a flagrant untruth on
top of so much else he had to consider. The transcript
made it clear that the phrase “general impression” drew
the questions like spilt honey will draw a cluster of wasps.
The chairman circled the evidence over and over as
though it were vital, though he was likely just trying to get
to a single fact. It was reported on with such thoroughness, such persistence, that the public must have been
given little choice but to believe this was the nub of the
matter, Ismay’s insistence on speed. “A general impression” ended up having more credence than a proven fact.

Who were all these strange creatures who spun details
from inference and invention? The trouble is, and always
was, that Ismay could never really understand it—the
motivation from the individual’s point of view. He could
understand why collectively they all needed someone to
blame. There was symmetry to the idea. Like gathering
frost crystals that form recognizable patterns on a window
pane, a system of enquiry was bound to yield something
specific, to hone into a single point of blame. Why not
him? He was, after all, ultimately in charge of the whole
operation, and an unimaginable disaster had occurred
under his leadership.

There was even a strange kind of comfort in it. The
accusations kept pace with the frantic pulse of his
thoughts. He questioned his faith in the Siemens-Martin
formula for steel plating. Was it cost and only cost that
had made him a convert? At the Belfast dockside, foremen
and engineers alike referred to the plating as “battleship
strength.” Was this merely because Ismay was present?
Did they suppose this was the answer he wanted to hear?

In the months after the disaster Ismay would rattle
feverishly through drawers at four in the morning, finding,
reading, and re-reading the letters, searching for hidden
meaning, for opportunities to confirm he was the culprit.
He read through Thomas Andrews’ memos and letters
about the number of lifeboats. Before the disaster
Andrews’ query had sounded half-hearted to him, like a
man who merely wished to be reassured it was all right to
reduce the number of lifeboats when he, too, preferred the
idea of unencumbered deck space. Ismay felt at the time he
was merely helping to snip away some red tape. Now, with
the
Titanic
gone, it all seemed more open-ended. Andrews
was asking for leadership, and what did he give?

All the decisions seemed right at the time, as Julia kept
telling him, trying to control her impatience and desperation. But in point of fact, of course, they were wrong. This
was the problem. Who, ultimately, could disagree with
that simple analysis? And who could sharry the blame if
not the person who had made those decisions?

If anyone could have found a way to squeeze wisdom
from it all it would have been his father. Yet there was a
conundrum; the notion of a disaster of
Titanic
’s scale
while his father lived and presided as chair was simply
unthinkable. Catastrophe—real catastrophe involving
heart-rending tears and desperation—could not exist in
the same space as someone as indomitable as Thomas
Ismay. Ismay caught this belief in the censorious shake of
the head of some of the older directors in the meetings
Ismay chaired after the
Titanic
. If the
Oceanic
had struck
an iceberg, his imagination had them thinking, Thomas
would have kept the ship afloat by sheer strength of character. No doubt their judgment of him was all wrapped up
with the accusations of cowardice, but loss was their
concern, financial loss and the stability of the company.
His willing death would have made no difference to that.

Ultimately it hardly mattered why he was blamed. As
a child he had been struck by an image of St. Sebastian in
a Religious Studies school book. Tied to a stake, face
contorted with pain, a dozen fiery arrows stuck out of
him. It served a purpose for the world, this ritual slaughter, he knew now. Ismay daily faced the arrows from
outside and from within. Without them, without the
scorching heat of distraction, he would have gone insane.

Still, while he is inured to the arrows, Mrs. Grimsden
and her type mystify him. The individual’s role in creating
blame is distasteful somehow, like a leer before the scaf
fold, the pull of the condemned’s feet to hasten strangulation.

For the second time tonight he doesn’t take his eyes
from her, and for the second time tonight her stare seems
to grow in indignation. And then something happens
which is both new and unexpected, an emotion rising on
the heels of his memory of Mrs. Grimsden’s friend and her
“general impression.” The feeling gathers strength and
sensation—the taste of April 15, the ice whiskers in the
air, the hubbub, the growing panic and confusion upon
the deck, and the odd, elongated silence after a flare
hissed into the crystal black sky.

Ismay laughs.

It’s merely the physical response to absurdity, unfiltered by logic or intellect. The silly, pointless lie from Mrs.
Grimsden’s friend, the stare he’s confronting now from the
lady herself seem akin to scavengers picking over a battlefield. One bends to remove the gun from a severed hand
as cannon smoke drifts and curls. Another tugs upon an
ammunition belt, trying to loosen the strap. What’s a
hostile stare to fifteen hundred lives lost? The impulse in
the diaphragm which caused his laugh returns, but this
time the emotion scatters in many directions, and he can
feel the nudge of tears and the sting of rage as well.

He’s not surprised that Mrs. Grimsden’s eyes now burn
more sharply than before, and he even sees some colour
in her pale cheek. But still, he can’t take his stare away,
and subtly his body begins to move as though in obedience to some unconscious desire, his back shifting to
make his view of her less awkward, his elbow hooking
over the back of his chair. Into Mrs. Grimsden’s eyes have
come real horror now, and if he is not mistaken, some
sparks of fear. If he retains his position, he suspects, she
will look away soon enough.

He can feel Evelyn’s concern trying to distract him, but
he’s taken control, at least for the moment. Mrs. Grimsden
and her plain accusing stare have brought him back to the
night where his old life ended and a new one—of scorching dreams and sleepless worries—began. He wonders at
his own survival once more, feels the alternative, the icy
waters slooping inside his cuffs, rushing up his trouser
legs, filling his lungs and belly. How long would death
have taken that night? he wonders. Five minutes, perhaps
ten. Yet here he is, thirteen years later, still on board the
listing deck of the
Titanic,
making his way through the
barging crowds to the officers in charge, trying to find
order, trying to scrape up hope and reassurance from the
chaos. He settles on a moment. He’s helping the crew at a
lifeboat station, slowly turning a handle of the winch that
lowers a lifeboat boat which is only slightly more that half
full. His cold-numbed fingers against the metal seem
hardly his own. The reality skims through his mind that
all of it—the lifeboat swaying from the ropes as it’s
lowered into the abyss, the winches, davits, the planking
under his feet, the great funnels billowing steam, the very
handle he turns—are part of
his
plan. The very same pink
fingers he sees belong to the hands which inherited from
his father the empire of the White Star Line. He and only
he, he realizes, can be the architect of whatever disaster
he is about to witness.