The Midnight Watch (14 page)

‘You said I’d be first on board.’

‘Come, come. When I couldn’t find you I could hardly deny the others, could I? Don’t sulk now, you’ve not missed a thing, and you’ve me to thank for persuading the captain to say anything at all. Stern fellow, he is – didn’t want to speak at first, said he had nothing whatsoever to say. Nothing whatsoever! Until I told him it was his duty to say something. And so he’s about to give a little press conference – only one, he said, only one, and absolutely no photographs, but he will tell us all he knows and all he did, and that will be that. It’ll make a nice little story for your paper, I should think, a nice little story.’

‘But what about the bodies?’

‘Sorry, old boy, there are no bodies. I asked him outright and he answered outright. They found none. Not a single one. They didn’t even find much wreckage, just a few bits and pieces. He’ll tell you all about it. He’ll give you a nice little story.’

Jack Thomas was sweating. Perhaps he knew I was done for, and that ‘a nice little story’ wouldn’t save me. He eased himself into an architrave so that I could squeeze past him, then he turned and followed me along the alleyway. ‘Straight ahead,’ he called. ‘Straight through, John. Just push through. Go right to the front. That’s it,
push
!’

An open louvred door led into a small room overfilled with men. On one side was a large table, on the other a green settee. There were no windows. A bare electric light bulb gave off a hard glow. Six or seven pressmen shouted, surged and retreated. There was simply not enough space for us all. One reporter stood on the leather settee in his muddy boots. Someone belched.

Then I saw them: four men standing perfectly still, facing the crush, their backs against the bulkhead. They were very clearly Englishmen – tall, stiff and reserved. The tallest of them, the captain, stood at the centre in an immaculate blazer and cap. He had a man either side of him and a third stood partly in shadow behind.

People tell me there’s such a thing as love at first sight. I don’t know about that. But I do know that there’s such a thing as a
story
at first sight. And there was something about these men – their stillness, perhaps, or maybe their unimpeachable solidarity – that told me at once that something strange had happened on this ship, something more than ‘a nice little story’.

At first they reminded me of a Victorian family posing for a photograph, but then I thought of British soldiers mounting a last-ditch defence. The four men gazed into the middle distance and looked at no one in particular. They were a little piece of stoic England here in Boston. Then, as if responding to a secret cue, the captain raised a hand, palm outwards. He seemed somehow to shine with a special light. The pressmen grew silent.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, ‘I am Lord – Lord of the
Californian
– and I will answer your questions.’

His voice! It was such a surprise – its strange accent and the way it flowed around me like a warm breeze. It made me think, This is a man I would trust with my life.

‘But first,’ the captain continued, lifting his eyes a little, ‘let us say a prayer for those who have been lost in this tragedy.’ He asked that every man in the room bow his head. ‘Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave.’ It was a hymn we all knew, but Lord did not sing the words, he spoke them in that voice with its own mysterious music. ‘Who bids the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep; Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea.’

I looked hard at the glazed porcelain of his face, trying to read it. But I could not. I did not know what I was looking at. The officers either side of him were likewise closed off and emotionless. But then I caught something in the man at the back, the man who was almost hidden. He was clearly terrified – his eyes, as large as a woman’s, darted left and right, his eyelashes flickered, his jaw twitched – but there was something else there, something less obvious. I stared at him, and for the briefest instant his eyes locked onto mine with a pained intensity, as if he were asking for help, as if he were being held hostage. And in that moment I thought of the photograph I’d seen only days earlier in New York, in the station saloon. I remembered now the word that came to me for Harry Houdini:
trapped.

This man before me felt trapped. Why?

And then a subtle but odd thing happened. The captain, seeing me studying the officer behind him, shifted very slightly sideways so as to block him from my view. He was protecting him. Again I wondered, Why?

The press conference was about to begin. I got out my pencil and prepared to write down every word Captain Lord said.

*   *   *

‘We left London on April 5
th
and had a comparatively pleasant voyage until about the tenth day out, April 14
th
, when we ran into such a mass of ice that I deemed it safest to stop the engines and let the vessel stand until the course became clear.’

I wrote down the words verbatim, as quickly as the captain spoke them, using my own shorthand – not a proper stenographical system like Pitman’s or Gregg’s, but a mixture of words, scrawls and symbols I’d developed over the years. The captain, slightly hunched forward in this low-ceilinged room, spoke clearly and evenly, as if he had memorised his words.

‘Scarcely had the boat been brought to a standstill when we received a relayed message from the steamer
Virginian
. The SOS was signalled to C. Evans, the Marconi operator on board our steamer. We knew the danger attending any attempt to steer the vessel through the icefloes, but also knew that no effort should be lost to render what assistance we could. We were about twenty miles away.’

Even though the captain’s language was strangely formal – ‘C. Evans’, ‘attending any attempt’, ‘render assistance’ – there was nonetheless some good material here. It would be easy to write Thomas’s nice little story – a tragic tale of thwarted heroism. But I had promised a story about bodies, and I was getting nothing exclusive from this captain: my fellow reporters’ pencils were just as busy as mine.

Captain Lord described how his ship had pushed through the icefield but arrived just as the
Carpathia
was hoisting the last lifeboat aboard. ‘We offered to help, but the captain informed us that he required no assistance.’

I saw Sam Jameson from the
Monitor
write ‘tragically, no help needed’. I was losing interest. But then Lord said something that made me look up from my notebook. ‘We stood by and watched the proceedings.’

The
proceedings
? His words struck me as so very passive and detached. I saw Jameson put square brackets around them; the other reporters wrote nothing. They wanted this captain to say he had searched the scene frantically, or lowered lifeboats at once, or hung his head in despair. There was no place in their stories for standing by and watching. But I wrote the words down and I underlined them. They seemed to me the most important thing the captain had said so far – there was oddity in their blandness. They put me in mind of pawns in a game of chess, subtly positioned to protect a valuable piece.

‘How far away were you?’ I asked.

‘When?’ he responded, his eyes lifting high above our heads as if he were looking at something far away.

‘When you were … standing by and watching.’

‘Oh,
then
. No distance at all. A mile, perhaps.’

The emphasis on ‘then’ was almost imperceptible, but I had heard it. ‘And at other times?’ I asked. ‘When you got the SOS call, for example? How far then?’

Now there was a distinct hesitation. ‘Thirty miles – perhaps more.’

‘Thirty? I thought you said twenty before?’

‘Thirty.’

I pushed a little harder. ‘Do you have the exact latitude and longitude?’

Now his eyes fell. He fixed his gaze on me as if I were an insect that finally needed swatting. A Boston insect – more persistent, and less well mannered, no doubt, than those of England. The officers either side of him seemed hardly to breathe. ‘That information,’ he said, ‘the latitude and longitude, is something of a state secret.’

Latitude and longitude a state secret? Perhaps I had misheard. It made no sense. I pressed him further. ‘What do you mean?’

‘It will be in my report to the company. You will have to get it from the office.’

I heard Thomas’s sugary voice behind me: ‘You may give it now, if you wish,’ he said.

‘I do not have the exact figures for our overnight position – the exact latitude and longitude I cannot give. I shall put them in my report, in the usual way.’

A pencil fell to the floor. It belonged to a thin, bespectacled young man with oily hair – perhaps twenty years old – who loafed against the far wall and whom I hadn’t noticed before. The clatter, and the young man’s stifled cry, diverted attention from the captain. The reporter from the
Transcript
– the fastest and most astute of us – at once threw questions at the boy. ‘Are you the Marconi man? Tell us about the SOS call.’ There were instant and overlapping outbursts from others: ‘Did you hear from the
Titanic
directly? Can you show us the SOS message?’ The boy fidgeted and shuffled forward as if to speak. I tried to read his face: did I see resentment there?

But it was the captain who spoke. ‘We received the distress message shortly after dawn. At about 5.30, I would say – yes, about then.’

‘Can’t the boy answer? There’s nothing wrong with his vocal organs, is there?’ It was an impertinence that surprised even me. The question came from old Frank of the
Globe
, who I knew drank a gin martini every morning after breakfast, except on Sundays when he drank two: one for himself and one for the Lord. ‘Well?’ Frank demanded again. ‘Is there anything wrong with the boy? Can’t he speak for himself?’

‘I will answer your questions,’ Lord said, ‘on behalf of the ship. That is only proper, as her captain. I said that at the very beginning.’

‘Then you need to tell us more. I don’t have enough.’ Frank held his notebook forward to show its sparse scribblings. ‘If you’re the only one who can speak, then you must speak more!’

I did admire old Frank. Cobwebs of fine veins laced his cheeks and his left hand quivered with a strange palsy, but he was awed by no one, not even this tall, burnished captain of the British Merchant Marine. In Frank’s conception of things, the primary responsibility and duty of people – anyone, everyone – was to give him a good story.

‘Tell us about the ice – tell us more about that,’ said the reporter from the
Herald
, trying to be helpful.

The captain’s words began slowly to flow again – in that exotic accent with its commanding calm. ‘Our ship,’ he said, and my hand noted down his words as surely as one of Edison’s wax rolls, ‘bucked her way through continuous icefloes.’ He seemed to find his stride. ‘I forced my steamer to the limit of safety and all ordinary precautions were abandoned.’ He looked to Jack Thomas, who rolled one hand slowly over the other, like a steamer’s paddlewheel, as if to say, Keep going – give them more.

‘There were icefloes stretching in all directions,’ the captain obligingly went on, ‘and it was often necessary to slow down the engine to permit the ship to break her way through them without ripping off plates.’ The man had thawed a little; he made eye contact with us individually, as if remembering long-ago lessons in public speaking, and began to develop a sense of the dramatic. ‘I never in all my marine career saw so much ice!’ His words became active and for the first time he spoke of emotion. ‘At times, nervous and anxious as we were, we hardly seemed to be moving. We had to dodge the big bergs, skirt the massed field ice and plough through the line of least resistance. For three full hours we turned, twisted, doubled on our course – in short, manoeuvred one way or another – through the winding channels of ice.’

Winding channels of ice! When he tried, it seemed, this captain could be creative. I looked behind me and saw Thomas smiling warmly. The captain was at last doing a good job.

*   *   *

Only a few hours earlier, the
Carpathia
had berthed in New York, watched by forty thousand onlookers. The survivors came ashore in driving rain, and their individual stories – like the tiny flames of candles being lit in a dark cathedral – had begun to illuminate a very great tragedy. Visions flashed upon the consciousness of a nation: first-class men standing on sloping decks in dinner jackets, steerage passengers rushing wildly for the boats, Italians being shot dead by the
Titanic
’s officers, the mighty Captain Smith, his great white beard spreading around him in the black waters, swimming to a lifeboat with a baby in his arms. There were visions of shame, too: when a passenger was asked how Mr Ismay, chairman of the line, had escaped the doomed ship, the passenger simply shrugged and said, ‘Well, he got into a lifeboat.’

‘I wish I’d been down there,’ said old Frank from the
Globe
while we waited to be escorted to the
Californian
’s gangway. ‘I’d have shot him. That’s what we used to do with yellows back then, you know. Shoot ’em, straight up, no questions.’ When Frank spoke this way we never did know who the ‘we’ were, or when ‘back then’ was, and no one ever dared ask.

The talk went on. Frank massaged his swollen gums with a dirty finger. Other reporters muttered about being ‘down there’ – in New York, getting the real stories.

I slipped away. I had no desire to be in New York, and I was not yet ready to leave this ship, which, in her own passive way, intrigued me. I crossed the alleyway to the seaward side of the main deck, where there were no pressmen, and no crewmen either. I climbed the external stairs – narrow, rusty, steep – to the very topmost deck. I knew a little about ships, and there was something very specific and particular I wanted to find on this one.

The bridge, open to the weather, was deserted. There had been drizzle earlier, but now the late morning air sparkled clear and warm. The Bunker Hill Monument seemed strangely tall and close and great clusters of gulls whooped and cried amid the cranes of the nearby docks. The inner harbour, fed by the vibrant waters of the Charles and Mystic rivers, glowed blue and white. Years earlier, when my father had taken me exploring around the islands in an old Maine lobster boat, the harbour was alive with sail; the brown canvas of barques and barges snapped and cracked in the spring winds. But this morning, as I looked out, the harbour was thrashed and pummelled by the power of steam. Everywhere I saw the tall, straight funnels of the steam engines that drove the submerged propellers of tugs, barges and steamers, each taking the most direct route, none caring about the direction of the wind.