The Midnight Watch (27 page)

Nonetheless she smiled. She seemed almost to be expecting me. ‘Mr Steadman from America? Then you must be here to see my husband.’ Her voice had a wonderful lilting music.

‘I am,’ I said.

‘He came back only last night.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know.’

‘You’d better come through,’ she said. ‘We’re having tea outside.’ She led me down a narrow hall to an enclosed garden at the rear. A small table was laid with a teapot and cups, and seated at it, in a blue woollen sweater most probably knitted by his wife, was the man I had been trying so hard to speak to for so many weeks.

He was naturally surprised to see me. He stood quickly, looking from me to his wife and back again. The whites of his eyes were washed with pink; I thought, perhaps, he had been crying. I extended my hand. He hesitated, but then shook it.

‘Hello, Mr Stone,’ I said.

The last time I’d seen him was in the chartroom of his ship, in Boston, when he was defending his captain. Today he seemed tired: there were pouches of soft skin under his eyes and a tiny cluster of broken capillaries in the centre of one cheek. But he had still a strange beauty.

When I asked if he remembered me, he said of course he did. ‘I’m not allowed to speak to pressmen,’ he said. ‘The captain has forbidden it. The company has forbidden it.’

‘But I’m not a pressman any more,’ I said. ‘My newspaper fired me.’

‘Then what are you?’ he asked.

‘Must I be something, other than a friend?’

Mrs Stone had brought up a chair for me, but he did not yet invite me to sit. The three of us stood facing each other around the table. ‘The captain said, in Boston, that I must never speak to you – I mean,
especially
to you.’

‘But is he your captain while you’re here, in your own garden?’

Stone looked to his wife again, as if asking her what to do. ‘Let’s sit,’ she said. ‘If Mr Steadman has come all the way from America, then we must at least give him tea.’

But Stone did not sit. ‘Captain Lord says you were the one who printed Ernie Gill’s story.’

‘I am.’ I waited. Perhaps he expected me to apologise. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ I said. I hoped he remembered what I’d written on the card I gave him when we spoke outside his chartroom: ‘
Not your fault.’

At last we sat, but for some time no one spoke. The garden was a peaceful, private place – even in the weak grey light the flowers glowed, as if lit from within. Mrs Stone, to break the silence, began to give me their names. ‘Hyacinths,’ she said as I reached down to caress their unfamiliar blue petals. ‘And over there – tulips, daffodils and bluebells. We sit out here to catch the last of the light,’ she went on. ‘It’s only a small garden, but I do love it. All these little splashes of life. It gives me something to care for while Herbert’s away.’

Yes, I thought, it would be lonely in this hard city without him.

She held towards me a cup of tea. I would have preferred gin, which I’d been told the English drank from teacups, but I accepted the milky brown liquid. Mrs Stone laughed politely at me as I picked up the cup by its rim, rather than its dainty handle.

She asked me about myself – about America, my voyage across, my impressions of England. Her disarming gentleness drew me out. I spoke of Boston, of my daughter, of the suffragettes’ parade in New York, of how times were changing. She nodded and smiled and said the vote must come eventually, although she did not approve of the window-smashing in London. That, she said, was a step too far.

‘Sometimes you need to be brave,’ I said. ‘It’s an extraordinary sort of courage.’

‘Perhaps. But that’s a sort I do not have, or want.’

All the while I studied her face for any hint of shame. The Liverpool newspapers had, after all, over the past weeks been filled with stories of the
Titanic
’s rockets being seen and ignored by her husband. But I saw only solicitude and courtesy. The three of us, taking tea around the table in the garden, were like passengers in a little boat safely moored at the dock.

I decided to push the boat out a bit. I told her how grief-stricken the American nation was about the
Titanic
. Mrs Stone did not flinch or hesitate at this first mention of the disaster. No cloud passed across her face; her brows did not furrow. She said, simply, that it was a very tragic thing, but that the ship’s captain should never have been going at that speed – at night, with ice about.

Herbert Stone, tapping his teeth with his fingers, said nothing.

I pushed the boat out a little further. I spoke of my interest in the children who died. I said that there’d been barely a mention of them in the papers, either in America or here; that it was hard to find out anything about them. You could read column after column about Mr Astor or Mr Guggenheim, I said, but nothing about the children. ‘There were fifty-three of them left behind,’ I added, sipping my weak tea. ‘But no one seems to care much about them.’

Mrs Stone stirred her tea.

‘Or even know about them,’ I continued.

Her spoon touched gently the rim of her cup. ‘We have no children,’ she said, as if that fact alone made all children irrelevant. She looked away.

I tried to lighten the mood. I laughed about how Senator Smith in America had asked a
Titanic
officer what icebergs were made of.

Herbert Stone had all the while been sitting still and silent, but now he spoke. ‘It’s not such a silly question,’ he said. ‘Icebergs can have rocks, earth, and there can be air, too, trapped in them.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ I said.

‘They can be beautiful,’ he went on. ‘I saw three that very afternoon, when I was taking my sights – great tall things they were, with high cliffs and flat tops. I’d never seen anything like them.’

Here was my chance. ‘And you also saw some the next morning, I think?’

He poured himself some more tea but did not offer me any. ‘Why are you here, Mr Steadman?’

‘I’ve come to observe the London inquiry. I want to write about it.’

‘No. I mean
here
– right here, in my house, with us, now.’

I couldn’t tell whether his question was defensive or aggressive or pleading. ‘I wanted,’ I began, ‘to talk to you in Boston – in private. Mr Thomas had allowed it. He was to organise our meeting, but the business with the marshal, and Washington, intervened.’ For a moment I saw again the pained, shy eyes I’d seen on the
Californian
. ‘I wondered then,’ I continued, ‘and I wonder now, whether there’s some way I might help you.’

‘Help me?’ Stone gave a short, dismissive laugh. ‘When you said in Boston that you would help me, you were all the while arranging to publish the story of Mr Gill. That’s how you helped me then. Heaven knows how you plan to help me now.’

‘I do remember, Mr Stone, what I said, but I also remember what you said – that you saw no signals that night.’ I paused. Mrs Stone put down her cup. ‘But now, here in England, will you admit what you saw?’

Stone stood up and extended his hand. ‘Goodbye, Mr Steadman. I’m sorry if you’ve wasted your time.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, standing slowly and taking his hand, ‘publishing Mr Gill’s affidavit might, in the end, help you very much.’

Mrs Stone showed me out. At the door I thanked her and asked where I might find a nearby public house. She gave me some directions and then held my cold hands in her own. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that you have to leave so soon.’

‘You have absolutely nothing to be sorry for,’ I said.

*   *   *

I had not been drinking for more than ten minutes in the local tavern – a dark, squat building lying low among the odorous vapours of the Mersey – when I was interrupted by none other than Mrs Stone herself. She strode into the small room and drew up a chair at my table, panting a little. ‘You were able to follow my directions, then,’ she said. ‘I’m glad I found you.’

I stood and bowed and said the pleasure was all mine.

‘I had to come,’ she said, dabbing her face with a handkerchief, ‘to tell you that you are wrong.’

‘I often am,’ I said, smiling.

‘About the children, I mean,’ she went on. ‘The
Titanic
children. When you said that nobody knew or cared about them, you were wrong.’

She produced from her handbag a folded newspaper clipping and slid it across the table to me.
NORFOLK FAMILY OF ELEVEN WHO WERE WIPED OUT IN THE
TITANIC
DISASTER
ran the headline above a photograph. ‘The first photograph published of the Sage family,’ the caption read, ‘all the eleven members of which went down in the
Titanic
. The group shows the father and mother with their five boys and four girls.’ Every one of the children’s names was set out, and the piece went on: ‘Mr and Mrs Sage kept an inn at Gaywood, near King’s Lynn, on the main road to Sandringham, and afterward moved to Peterborough, where they had a business in Gladstone Street. Some time ago Mr Sage decided to emigrate to Jacksonville, Florida, where he intended to start fruit-farming, and the family were on the way to the land of their adoption.’

I had not so far, in all of the hundreds of pages of newsprint I’d read about the disaster, seen a single image of any of the children who died. But now, in my hands, I saw nine of them. And they were all from the one family.

‘You see, we do care,’ Mrs Stone said. I didn’t know who she meant by ‘we’ – she and her husband? Liverpool? England? humanity? – but it didn’t matter. I studied the photograph. The Sage family had positioned themselves stiffly and formally in front of their large, perfectly square brick house. The shot had been taken from a distance but I could see the children clearly enough: a girl sulking near a window, a boy standing with his little sister and looking dreamily into the middle distance, two children sitting precariously on a wall, a handsome young man in a doorway, and the eldest son sitting on a horse. The father was leaning nervously near a window, his arms crossed. The mother, straight-backed and tight-corsetted, sat with a little boy on her lap. And there, in the centre of the photograph, the eldest daughter stood tall in her bleached-white shirtwaist, her hair high and wild.

I slid the clipping back across the table and Mrs Stone replaced it in her handbag. ‘He knows their names,’ she said. ‘Every one. He has memorised them.’

I drained my ale. ‘It’s very sad,’ I said, ‘to think of all those children drowning.’

‘But they didn’t drown,’ she said. ‘I know that’s what the newspaper says, but please don’t think they drowned. My husband told me – they had lifejackets on, and the water would have taken the heat from their little bodies very quickly. Soon they would have stopped shivering and by the end they’d have felt quite warm.’

‘Quite warm?’ I smiled. ‘Among the icebergs?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without a trace of doubt or irony. ‘Quite, quite warm.’

It was an odd phrase, and I took out my notebook and wrote it down.
Quite, quite warm
. I tried to imagine the children floating in their lifejackets in that black and forbidding water feeling quite, quite warm. There was comfort in the idea – it was much better than thinking of them struggling for breath – and if it was comforting for me, I supposed it must be a hundred times so for Mrs Stone’s husband.

For a time we did not speak. Mrs Stone seemed nervous, as if she were building up courage to tell me something. Her eyes darted about and she ran her fingers through her great sweeping side curls. She adjusted and readjusted her green and white necktie, which reminded me of a schoolboy’s. Hard Merseyside men stared at her – she was the only woman in the tavern. ‘Would you mind terribly,’ she asked, ‘if we went somewhere else?’

‘Of course not,’ I said. ‘Wherever you like.’

I followed her from the tavern to the street outside. The sun had set long ago but the twilight lingered. We climbed some narrow stairs and walked along a series of laneways between cavernous brick buildings. We crossed a footbridge above a freight railway, then climbed more stairs and arrived at a wrought-iron bench set in a patch of grass not much bigger than the bench itself. We sat and caught our breath.

Behind us, somewhere, was ‘the street that died o’ shame’ and the ghosts of Maggie Donoghue and Tommy Foy. In front of us lay the great yards, warehouses and cranes of the Merseyside wharves. Gulls swooped and soared and the shouts of men drifted up from the piers. Through narrow gaps between buildings I could see the flat grey sheet of the river moving bodily and silently.

Mrs Stone told me that her husband’s ship was down there somewhere, being unloaded. ‘He’s a good man, you know.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do know.’

She frowned a little. I did not think she’d expected such a quick and compliant response. She had been preparing herself for debate. ‘Do you think the people in London – at the inquiry – will see that he is?’

‘If he speaks the truth, I think they will.’ I leaned back a little and lit a cigarette.

‘When you said,’ Mrs Stone continued after a time, ‘this afternoon, in our garden, that you could help him, what did you mean?’

‘I could write his side of the story,’ I said. ‘I could explain it all.’

She looked at me awhile, thinking. ‘You could show people that he’s a good man?’

‘I could try,’ I said.

‘How would you do it?’

‘I could describe you,’ I said, smiling. ‘Perhaps that would be enough.’

Mrs Stone laughed. This higher space seemed to calm her, to open her out, and she began to tell me about her husband’s voyage to Boston, and how difficult it had all been. She told me of his childhood – of a sensitive boy who loved books growing up among the granite and limestone of Devon, of a cruel father who stuffed rags in his mouth and told him not to cry. Herbert’s father had once drowned kittens in a bag and forced his son to watch.

‘His father was an odd man,’ Mrs Stone said. ‘When I first met him he made me hold his hands so I could feel how rough they were. Then he gripped me tighter and tighter, and when I cried out he just laughed. “A little princess,” he said. “Herbert’s got himself a little princess…”’ She winced at the memory.