The Midnight Watch (18 page)

‘I thought so. Well, the wireless boy on the
Carpathia
, the rescue ship – Cotton, I think his name is, or Cotham, something like that – I talked to him.’

‘And?’

‘He said that the wireless man on your ship was a nuisance on the morning of the disaster. Kept interrupting. Excitable. Kept saying over and over that he had precedence. Have you spoken to him?’

‘No.’ I remembered the wireless boy’s enforced silence during the captain’s meeting with the press.

‘Perhaps you ought: my man said he heard yours trying to warn the
Titanic
about ice only half an hour before she hit the iceberg.’

‘Half an hour!’

‘Yes. The
Titanic
told him to shut up, according to my man.’

I thought hard. The
Californian
had tried to warn the
Titanic
? But the liner had steamed on regardless to her doom? It would be a page one story if it was true.

‘You’d better get hold of that wireless boy,’ Dan said, the line crackling suddenly with interference.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’d better.’

*   *   *

Cyril Evans beamed at me like a young boy on Christmas morning. His collar was a startling white; I could smell bleach.

‘I am very glad you’ve come,’ he said, ‘although I’d rather thought Mr Marconi might come himself.’

‘He sends his apologies – and congratulations.’

The young man was unusual-looking. His head was too large, his body too skinny, his hair too black. The light of a brilliant intelligence shone in his eyes, but they were open too wide. They seemed to search about blindly. He struck me as utterly credulous. He had, after all, accepted without question the telegram I’d sent, addressed to the wireless operator,
Californian
: ‘Marconi publicity agent wishes meeting to thank you on behalf Marconi. 4 p.m. today Marginal Street saloon.’ And here he was. Simple as that. He did not seem to recognise me as one of the press contingent that had bustled about him in the chartroom. My rudimentary disguise – a pair of plain-glass spectacles – had worked.

‘I wondered,’ the boy said a little nervously, ‘if Mr Marconi would want to speak with me in person, like he did with Jack Binns.’

‘Jack Binns?’ I asked.

Evans tilted his head to one side as he looked closely at me. ‘Of the
Republic,
’ he said.

‘Of course. Mr Binns.’

‘The hero.’

‘Yes. The hero.’ Now I vaguely remembered: Binns was the wireless operator who had called aid to the White Star’s
Republic
after it was rammed off New York. Afterwards he travelled the country giving little lectures.

Evans pasted his oily hair to his head with both hands and then looked at me with sudden focus. ‘We were the nearest ship, you know. We had precedence.’

‘But – certainly you were not closer than the
Carpathia
?’

‘Yes we were!’ His outburst surprised me. ‘We were the
closest
. That’s why I had
precedence
under the rules. Mr Balfour said he was going to report me for jamming, but it was my
right
to talk so I could find out what was happening and guide other ships in. Just like Jack Binns.’ The boy spoke as if he were unpacking a great storeroom of hurt and indignation. ‘I had precedence,’ he added one more time. ‘Please tell Mr Marconi.’

I thought he might cry. ‘Mr Marconi is very proud of you,’ I said. This seemed to lift his spirits and there was the hint of a smile. I leaned closer. ‘Did you try to warn the
Titanic
?’

This idea – of monumental significance – seemed uninteresting to Evans. ‘Yes,’ he said, looking at the ceiling. ‘At eleven o’clock that night. Just before the accident. I called the operator up and said, “Say, old man, we’re stopped and surrounded by ice.” He came straight back so loud I had to lift my headphones off. “Shut up, shut up,” he said, and “Keep out.” He was working Cape Race. You know – sending passenger messages.’

‘He told you to shut up?’

‘Yes. But it doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a little way we operators have with each other. We don’t take it as an insult or anything like that. I met Jack Phillips once in the Marconi London office. He was very nice to me.’

We sat in respectful silence for a moment. Then the boy began to look around, as if searching for someone more interesting to talk to. ‘What did you do,’ I gently pressed, ‘after he told you to keep out?’

‘I took off my ’phones and got into bed, didn’t I? I read a magazine and fell asleep. Then Charlie came in – Mr Groves, that is, the third officer – and he tried to have a listen, but he didn’t know the detector had wound down. It’s a little box,’ he said, anticipating my question and using his hands to shape a rectangle in the air, ‘with wires spinning around –’ here he gave a twirling motion with his forefinger – ‘which pick up the signal. So, he heard nothing. If he’d wound it up he would have heard the
Titanic
sending SOS and CQD over and over.’

I paused to think of it. The
Titanic
frantically sending. The
Californian
peacefully stopped, near enough to have precedence, but no longer listening. A girl brought me a drink. A fly buzzed. Through an open door I saw that the afternoon had become clear and blue.

Cyril Evans, his head bowed, was wiping his spectacles with his shirt. ‘If somebody had woken me up, I would have heard Phillips, on the
Titanic
. He was kind to me, in London. I would have heard him, and we would have gone down to help him.’ He put his spectacles back on – great, thick chunks of glass – and looked up at me. ‘But instead,’ he added with touching simplicity, ‘he drowned.’

The boy’s eyes, so large, so round, gave his face a sudden clarity. I saw pain and sorrow: the anguish of a hero denied, a slow-burning indignation that such a tragedy could have happened so close without him being allowed to help. Thin, awkward boys like Cyril Evans, I supposed, did not get many opportunities to prove themselves men; he seemed acutely aware that his chance had slipped away forever.

‘So,’ I prompted, ‘you slept until…?’

‘The next morning, just before dawn, when the chief officer shook me awake and said there was a ship in trouble, and asked me to find out what was the matter.’

‘So you went to your instrument?’

‘At once. Within a minute I had the news. We went through the ice to the other side and headed down to her position, but all we saw was the
Mount Temple
searching about. Then we saw the
Carpathia
so we came back through the ice again, but it was too late. She had already taken up all the boats. She steamed off and we stayed behind to look for bodies.’

‘Did you see any?’

‘None. We steamed around for a while, but all we saw was loose wreckage. A half-sunk boat. Some clothes and lifejackets. That sort of thing.’

Evans paused for a moment, fidgeting nervously. ‘Do you think,’ he asked, moistening his lips with little darts of his tongue, ‘that Mr Marconi would allow me to talk to the newspapers about what happened? About me having precedence and trying to help?’

Something about this boy’s open-faced trust, his naïve aspirations and his visceral disappointment, made me regret – just for a moment – my subterfuge. ‘You would like to talk to a newspaper?’

‘Jack Binns did, and Harry Bride from the
Titanic
, and Cottam from the
Carpathia
, so it seems only fair that I should get to say something, me being the operator who —’

‘Had precedence?’

‘Yes,’ he said slowly. ‘The captain says we’re not to talk to anyone, but I thought, if Mr Marconi said so…’

The boy stopped speaking. He was looking over my shoulder, so I turned in my seat and saw a short, thin man framed by the doorway of the saloon. He wore a great square blazer with golden rings on its cuffs. His mouth was hidden by a large moustache and his eyes by the rim of an officer’s cap, but when he stepped further into the room I recognised him as the man who’d stood closest to Captain Lord during the press meeting. He was, I assumed, the captain’s senior officer. He did not say anything but Evans stood up quickly and walked over to him. The two spoke quietly for a moment before Evans returned to the table.

‘You should have just told me,’ he said. ‘You didn’t have to lie.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said simply, taking off my spectacles.

‘Which newspaper?’ he asked.

‘The
Boston American
.’

‘You should have just told me.’

He picked up his cap, turned and walked with the officer out of the saloon.

It was late afternoon. I ordered another drink, and then another. I thought about what the wireless operator had told me. Was
this
my story then? A story of spectacular hubris? A story of a small ship trying desperately to warn a mighty liner and being ignored? A story of British overconfidence meeting its just deserts? American readers already had Cowardly Mr Ismay to blame, now I could give them Arrogant Jack Phillips as well.

It was a story, too, with unbearable dramatic irony. The agony! My readers would want to reach desperately into the page and wind up that magnetic detector themselves. How cruel it is, they would think, that fifteen hundred lives should depend on one tiny clockwork mechanism.

And yet still I did not file. There was something about what the wireless boy had said that did not make sense. I read my notes, ordered another bourbon, then read them again. I knew the answer was there somewhere but I could not see it. With a red pencil I circled phrases at random: ‘stopped and surrounded by ice’; ‘shut up, shut up. Keep out’; ‘I went to bed’; ‘the detector had wound down’; ‘chief woke me in the morning and said a ship was in trouble’; ‘in a minute I knew’; ‘we came back through the ice’… There was something wrong but by now my mind was so addled by drink I could not see what it was.

In the evening my bar-girl friend arrived and we shuffled off to her place. We walked along the harbour’s edge on soft grass. She slipped her arm through mine and her face glowed pale in the starlight. I let the red and green lights of channel buoys mesmerise me. I squinted so that the flashing white lights of the cardinal marks danced among my eyelashes. I could not tell how close or far away these lights were; I felt I could reach out and touch them.

It was later, as I lay in bed listening to my friend’s deepening breathing and thinking of those lights across the water, that the answer came to me. I thought about what Dan Byrne had told me, I saw again the senior officer in the door of the saloon, and I understood what was wrong with the wireless boy’s story. Suddenly and completely it all made perfect sense.

*   *   *

‘The
Californian
,’ I said, rather triumphantly the following day, ‘saw the
Titanic
sinking and did nothing to help her.’

Krupp pushed himself back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. It was midmorning. The curtains were open; his red hair flamed in the light.

‘That is my story,’ I continued. ‘It’s not one of my body stories but it will sell. It will create an outrage.’

Krupp leaned forward. ‘Nobody else knows about this?’

‘Nobody. It’s a scoop.’

My boss sat deep in thought for a moment. ‘How do you know that your ship saw the
Titanic
?’

‘Yesterday I spoke to the wireless operator. He didn’t mean to tell me, but he did – one little phrase gave it away. He’d been asleep all night, he said, with his equipment switched off, but when the chief officer woke him the next morning he asked him to find out what was the matter, because there was
a ship in trouble.
’ I paused. My boss looked at me blankly. ‘Don’t you see?’ I continued. ‘If the wireless equipment was dead all night how could the chief have known there was a ship in trouble? There’s only one way he could have. Somebody on his ship must have
seen
it was in trouble.’

‘But how would they know it was in trouble?’

‘Rockets,’ I said. ‘I had thought that perhaps they could tell by a flashing light, or the angle of the lights, or something of that sort – but then this morning, on my way here, I saw this.’ I dropped onto his desk the morning edition of
The
Boston Herald
.
SHIP SIGHTED AS
TITANIC
SANK
ran the headline, and I waited a moment for Krupp to read on. ‘You see? Mr Boxhall of the
Titanic
has been telling the senators in Washington that he saw a ship in the distance, and that he sent up rockets to call for help.’

Krupp skimmed the rest of the article, sweeping his forefinger from side to side across the page.

‘Lots of other
Titanic
survivors have been saying they saw the ship too,’ I continued, ‘and all America wants to know what ship it was.
But I already know.
’

Krupp rubbed his temples. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Everything fits. That’s why the captain wanted to keep his own ship’s position a secret; that’s why he tried to push the
Titanic
further away; that’s why he didn’t let anyone else talk. He was protecting someone – whoever it was who saw the rockets.’

‘And that was…?’

‘The second officer. He looked terrified during the press conference. It’s the second officer who keeps watch during the middle of the night on ships, and that’s when the rockets would have been fired.’

‘But why would this man – this second officer – see rockets and do nothing?’

‘Now, that I don’t know. Perhaps he’d been drinking, or fell asleep, or mistook them for something else. That’s what I need to find out.’

‘And could they have got there in time? I mean, if this officer had told the captain?’

‘I think so. Both ships were on the same side of the icefield. The
Californian
did push through the icefield the next morning – the captain was very keen to tell us all about the winding channels of ice – but I know from Dan Byrne that the CQD position given by the
Titanic
was too far west. So the
Californian
pushed through the field for nothing. The wireless boy told me that they then had to steam
back through
the icefield to get to the wreck site. But if she’d steamed for the rockets as they were being fired —’