The Midnight Watch (16 page)

The captain was sitting at a table covered with newspapers. He gestured to Stone to sit and showed him the headlines of two:
LEYLAND LINER RUSHED TO SCENE OF THE
TITANIC
DISASTER BUT FOUND ONLY WRECKAGE
, and
CALIFORNIAN
’S RACE TO AID
TITANIC
TOLD BY CAPTAIN LORD
. ‘You see?’ said the captain. ‘Mr Thomas cannot complain that I have not given them what they wanted.’

‘No,’ said Stone. ‘He cannot complain.’

The captain began to read one of the stories aloud. ‘“It took some mighty good seamanship to pilot the freighter through the narrow winding channels of ice, and although her officers used every effort to keep her going as fast as possible, there were times when circumstance made it necessary for her to proceed at a snail’s pace.”’ The captain paused. ‘Very satisfactory, don’t you think?’ He puffed on his pipe.

Stone agreed: the meeting with the newspapermen of Boston had been a success. The captain’s charm – even though of an iron kind, heavy and majestic like an ocean steamer – had been enough to woo the Americans. Their faces shone when they listened to him talk of the
Californian
’s courage and speed. Not one of them had asked about the midnight watch and Stone himself had not had to say anything.

The captain, rummaging through the newspapers, seemed almost thrilled. Only days earlier he’d proclaimed that he would refuse to say one single word to the pressmen. He said they were like animals, that they had no honour. Now Stone stared at him and wondered at the power of flattery. The reporters’ praise of the captain’s seamanship was all it had taken for him to forgive their muddy footprints in the chartroom, their cigarette butts on the chart table and their impertinence.

In the soft morning light the saloon seemed to fill with the captain’s self-satisfaction, with his sense of the justice of it all. Nobody, Stone thought, would ever be able to point a finger at him and say he’d done anything wrong; nobody could ever deny that as soon as the wireless message came through he had gone to the
Titanic
as quickly as possible; nobody could doubt that he had driven his ship hard and shown some ‘mighty good seamanship’. For the captain, at least, a wrong in the world had been made right, a tear in the fabric of things had been sewn up, a wound had healed.

Stone watched him gather up the newspapers and fold them as carefully as if they were historic parchment, silently aligning corners and edges. ‘The matter is closed,’ he said, and perhaps he was right. It had been a difficult Atlantic crossing, with ice, and fog, and diversions from their course, but now the
Californian
was here in Boston, on time, with her men safe and her cargo complete and undamaged. Soon the ship would head back to Liverpool and this whole thing would drift into the past.

On the way back to his cabin, Stone passed by the chartroom. The mud and cigarettes had been cleaned away. The green settee smelled of saddle soap. The chart pencils were arranged in their clips, shortest to longest. The official logbook lay on its back, its large pages lying open as if inviting all to come and read. The steward had done his job well. There was no sign of the mess and dirt of the American pressmen. The chartroom was as clean, in fact, as Stone had ever seen it.

*   *   *

But as Saturday turned into Sunday, and his ship’s name slipped quietly out of the newspapers, and the weather grew warmer, Stone found that for him the matter was not quite closed after all.

He sat in his cabin and had little to do but think. ‘You spend too long in your room,’ his father once said to him, and on the
Californian
Captain Lord had made the same complaint, but this weekend the captain left Stone to himself. In fact no one bothered him, not the chief officer nor the apprentice nor talkative Evans. He was grateful, although he did notice that his friend Charlie Groves kept his distance too, and when they met in alleyways Groves’ eyes wandered nervously.

At night he could not sleep. He tried writing to his wife but his words seemed to float away to nothing. ‘Things are well in Boston, it is warmer than expected, all the talk is of the great catastrophe.’ What else could he say? He turned instead to reworking his letter to the captain, sitting at his desk in a kind of mania, pressing his words hard into the page to make them braver, to make them truer. He tried to picture again what he had seen – those distant lights in a night so black he felt he was adrift in space – and to think again of what he had done: flashing the Morse lamp, talking to Gibson, polishing the lenses of the binoculars. But the important details shifted and vanished like vapour. Was the ship he saw a large ship? Had she moved? How far away was she? ‘I don’t know what I remember any more,’ he’d said to Charlie Groves. And now, during these anxious Boston nights, he became even less certain. He underlined, circled, crossed out. He wrote a second draft and then a third. But each time he came to write down the most important words of all, the words he knew for certain were true, he heard the captain’s condemnation of them: ‘They are weak and they are disloyal.’ So he wrote them instead on a scrap of blotting paper – ‘I saw the rockets and I told you’ – and then screwed up the blotting paper and threw it away.

His cabin began to press in on him. He felt he was suffocating. When Groves told him he looked tired and should go ashore to get some air, he decided to heed the advice. The captain granted him leave, saying he might take as long as he liked. So, on Monday morning, one week exactly since the disaster, he caught the ferry across the harbour and walked the sparkling streets as if he were a diligent tourist. He clambered up the pretty laneways of Beacon Hill, he marvelled at the great gold dome of the State House, and he visited Paul Revere House where he saw a cardboard display showing the Righteousness of the Revolution. When Americans dipped their hats to him and told him they adored his accent, he smiled awkwardly and thanked them. But as the afternoon wore on and heavy wet air drifted in from the harbour, he realised that to come ashore had been a mistake. At first he had tried not to see the headlines on the newsstands at every corner, had tried not to hear the rasping voices of boys in green uniforms calling out the latest news. But so earnestly did one boy beg him to take a paper that he paid his cent, and then, as if in a trance, he bought another, then another. He took his bundle of papers to the Boston library, where he sifted through them until his fingers were black with newsprint. The
Titanic
survivors had come ashore in New York and every one of them had a story to tell. Above him soared the reading room’s great barrel-arched ceiling and twin domes, and although they were filled with light, when he looked up at them he saw again the vast black vault of the sky on the night of the rockets. And he began to hear the pitiful cries of human beings in the black water, flying upwards to a cold and icy heaven, so loud and so many that it seemed the ocean itself was dying.

The papers were brutal; they did not spare his feelings.
The
Boston Evening Transcript
listed the names of the passengers one by one, in column after column on its front page, with survivors in bold type. Stone stared silently at the inches of un-bolded names: Abbing, Abelson, Adams, Adams, Adolf, Ahlin …

Another paper listed the missing Bostonians. Mr Newell, President of the Fourth National Bank of Boston. Mr Futrelle, the famous author. Mrs Omine Honcarek and her two children, who were on their way to join their relatives in Boston. And more, and more. When he looked around the room, the men and women of Boston seemed no longer inclined to dip their hats and smile at him, but instead to be looking at him with hard, judging eyes. They knew what he had done. And what would they think, he wondered, if they knew that only two days ago his captain had sat smiling and chortling at stories in their newspapers about his own heroism and seamanship?

But there was one story worse than all the others, and it appeared in every newspaper. America was having a grand inquiry into the disaster, and everyone who knew anything about it was being called to Washington to appear before it. What if they were to ask the captain to tell his story of racing through the ice? Or worse – and the fear of it made Stone feel sick – what if they were to ask
him
?

He had seen enough newspapers. He hurried from the library and did not wait for the ferry. He took an electric car through the tunnel to the East Boston wharves and within half an hour was back in his cabin. He would try to take the captain at his word: the matter was closed. He need think about it no longer. If a steward brought him a morning paper, he would push it away.

Monday became Tuesday. The ship’s derricks banged and groaned under the weight of wheat and corn coming aboard in bulging sacks, and the dust of coaling barges settled on the deck among the spring petals. Groves told him that bad weather was sweeping east from the plains states, but for now Boston was calm: flies buzzed in Stone’s cabin and gulls squawked outside in the warm, still air. The fruit in the officers’ saloon glowed and ripened. He began, a little, to relax. He saw that the sailing board had been posted at the head of the gangway: the
Californian
would depart for Liverpool on the coming Saturday morning, the 27
th
of April, a few days away. He thought of home, of his wife bringing him tea and flowers, and lying on his bunk after lunch he slipped at last into a deep sleep.

It was Charlie Groves who woke him, shaking him by the shoulder with one hand and holding a newspaper in the other. It was so close to Stone’s face that its pages seemed as large as tablecloths. ‘Look,’ Groves was saying, ‘wake up and look at this.’

Stone sat up, and took a moment to orientate himself. He did not want to read the paper. He wanted to go back to sleep. But something must be wrong, he knew, for Groves to be in his cabin like this, so excited. There was something terrible about the newspaper; it felt to Stone suffocating and overwhelming.

He took the paper from Groves. The front-page headline was so black and bold each word seemed to shake at him like a fist.

SHIP SIGHTED AS
TITANIC
SANK

Beneath it, and in letters only slightly smaller, was the sub-headline:
DISTRESS SIGNALS IGNORED, ASSERTS OFFICER BOXHALL
.

Stone felt something more than fear – he felt a strange fracturing of himself, as on the morning of the disaster, when he seemed to watch the events from above, from a point outside his body.

He had let the newspaper fall loosely to his lap. Groves snatched it up and read aloud. ‘“With succor only five miles away, the huge White Star liner
Titanic
slid into her watery grave, carrying with her more than 1500 of her passengers and crew, while an unidentified steamship which might have saved all failed or refused to see the frantic signals flashed to her for aid. Both with rockets and with the Morse electric signal did the young officer hail the stranger.”’ There was something frantic about Groves as he read – a breathlessness, a dryness of the mouth, as if it were his own soul at stake.

With rockets and with the Morse electric signal.
Stone let the fearful vision of those rockets come back to him. They alone were perfect in his memory. White on black with no greys; little white flowers with delicate stalks and tiny white petals falling silently in the blackness. Odd: it had never occurred to him that just as he had been watching the other ship across the sea, she had been watching him.

Worse than that: she had been calling to him. She had fired those rockets for
him.

He took the newspaper from Groves and in a moment was in the captain’s cabin, holding it up before Lord’s large, surprised face.

‘You are upset,’ the captain said, trying to take the paper from him. ‘Sit down and calm yourself. Beware your tendency to panic.’

But Stone no longer cared what Captain Lord had to say. And when he felt the chief officer’s grip on his shoulder from behind, he jerked himself free with unexpected strength.

‘Captain,’ he said, ‘they saw us watching them. They fired those rockets for us.’ He could not stop himself. ‘Now we will have to tell the truth, because they saw us. And they will find us out, no matter what you say.’

CHAPTER 11

I began my story about Lord’s heroism in the Marginal Street saloon on Friday afternoon. But I soon stopped. I didn’t believe what I was writing. The
Californian
was a story of something, but it wasn’t heroism. There was something else at work on that perplexing ship.

So I didn’t file. Instead, after half a gallon of beer, I was taken by a bar girl to her home somewhere east along the harbour – a ramshackle place so near the water its walls seemed made of mud. I slept fitfully, plagued by the mournful tolling of buoy bells, and when I awoke early on Saturday morning my friend said I’d been crying in my sleep. My head ached. She gave me a slip of paper with her address on it and asked if I would stay with her again. I said I would, although in the half-light I could see that she was not young.

The fog had come in once more, and as I waited for the ferry little eddies of warm air brought with them the stink of coal and dead fish. I didn’t feel well. So I was much relieved when the steamboat at last arrived and by some mysterious means of navigation managed to grope its way to the South Ferry wharf. I ought to have gone straight to my office, but there was something I needed to do first. I walked across the city to a narrow house on Charles Street, nestled beneath Beacon Hill, and knocked hard on the door.

‘What do you want?’ my wife asked when she opened it. I could see her friend lurking behind her in the parlour, smoking a cigarette.

It was my house – bought with money left to me by my father – but my wife didn’t see it that way. These days she had a modern way of thinking and used lawyerly words and phrases that sounded odd falling from her soft lips. She spoke of ‘opportunity costs’ and ‘misrepresentations’ and said that if I had disclosed that I was an intemperate drunk and philanderer before she married me she would never have consented to do so. My wife was right about most things, but on this point she had cause and effect around the wrong way. It was
because
our marriage had failed that I embraced bourbon and sought out – well, alternative intimacies. And the failure of our marriage was not my fault, and my wife knew it.