The Midnight Watch (37 page)

It was a misty afternoon in late November in that same year of 1959 when she welcomed Harriet and me to her home in Bootle. It was a smaller house than that in which I’d seen her almost fifty years earlier, but it was all she could afford, she said, so there was no use complaining. She had raised three children since we last met, two sons and a daughter, who were now raising children of their own.

We sat in the front parlour and spoke of jet travel, television, supermarkets and
Sputnik
. Mrs Stone made us tea, and when the afternoon light began to fade she turned on a small electric radiator. In its soft orange glow the three of us looked almost young again. For a while no one spoke, and in our little cocoon of warmth time seemed to slow.

‘We were so very sorry,’ Harriet said at last, ‘to hear about your husband.’

‘Thank you,’ Mrs Stone replied. ‘Herbert was the gentlest of men. I miss him very much.’

He had died, she said, quite suddenly, during his usual morning walk to work. A brain haemorrhage. He had been a storeman at the nearby docks, still able to lift heavy boxes even at the age of seventy-two. He stayed at sea for more than twenty years after the
Titanic
but he was never very happy. He never got his own command. He went missing once, from his ship in London, and was eventually found sitting alone on a pier in Devon. He didn’t return to sea again after that. ‘He much preferred his work in the warehouse,’ she said. ‘He loved it.’

I wondered what it had been like for him – all those years in that warehouse to think and remember. And I wondered what it had been like for this gracious woman who sat before me with pretty flowers pinned to her blouse. I felt sorry for her: when Harriet and I took our leave she would again be alone in this house. I was grateful for my splendid, devoted daughter, with me always, more important than air.

‘Why are you here?’ Mrs Stone asked softly, and I recalled that once her husband had asked me the very same thing.

‘I’m on my way to see Stanley Lord,’ I said, ‘and it would hardly have been polite not to call in on you, would it?’ I waited a little, smiled, then added, ‘And you never did tell me what you thought of my story – of the eight rockets.’

‘Didn’t I?’

‘No, you didn’t.’

‘Well, I thought it was very sad.’

Again we fell to silence. A wireless crackled softly in an adjacent room, and I could hear someone picking out a tune on a neighbour’s piano. Children laughed in the far distance. Mrs Stone seemed to be listening for something specific in these sounds, angling her head one way and then the other, but I could not tell what.

‘Did Mr Lord,’ she asked, closing her eyes in thought, ‘ever tell you what
he
thought of your story?’

‘I doubt he would have bought a copy.’

‘My husband sent him one.’

‘Then I doubt he would have read it.’

Mrs Stone seemed to ponder this carefully. Then, without speaking, she rose and left the room. I wondered whether we had been dismissed, but a moment later she returned with a thin brown envelope. ‘If you’re going to see Mr Lord,’ she said, ‘then please do give him this.’ She took from the envelope a small sheet of yellowed paper on which words had been scrawled in pencil.

I knew at once what it was, even though so many years had passed. My memory clarified, like images resolving on photographic paper: the
Californian
’s bridge; a small, unlocked cupboard; the ship’s scrap log; the stubs of torn-out pages, one stub showing that a particular page had been cut out with meticulous care.

Mrs Stone handed me that page now as reverently as if it were a sacred parchment, and in the soft light I read Herbert Stone’s tentative, pencilled words. ‘One Bell: Ship – southwest – fired white rocket. Four more rockets – Informed Master by speaking tube. Two Bells: Morsed ship as per captain’s orders. Two more rockets. Strange glare of light. Three Bells: One more rocket. Eight in total. Informed Master by apprentice. Five Bells: Ship disappeared in southwest. Informed Master by speaking tube.’ The words were faded and smudged, yet they were enough to drag that little piece of history through time and space to appear vividly before me once again.

‘Your husband cut this page out?’ I asked.

‘No. Not my husband.’ She gave a little laugh. ‘Mr Stewart did. Do you remember him? The chief officer. A strange man. He sent this page just before the war, to return it to its rightful owner.’ Mrs Stone paused, then added, ‘He cut it out to protect the captain, you see.’

I did see. The words ‘Informed Master’ appeared three times on the page. In this whole sorry business, those two words were for Herbert Stone the most important of all.

‘Herbert wrote to Mr Lord many times over the years,’ Mrs Stone said. ‘He pleaded with him. As I say, he even sent him a copy of your story. But he never heard back.’

As I looked around the room, the years seemed to blend away and make vivid my sadness. There were framed photographs of Herbert on the walls – with his children, with his grandchildren – but images came to me of him facing the men of the Boston press in the cramped chartroom of his ship. He had been fearful then, a trapped animal, and his eyes had looked to me for help. I’d given him my card and asked him to talk to me, but I should have done more.

‘Make sure he reads it,’ Mrs Stone said with a new firmness. ‘Make him read that page and make him understand: my husband called him, and he should have gone up. It’s simple, really. If he can accept that, then at last, at long, long last, this thing will be over.’

I gave my promise: I would deliver to Lord the scrap log page and I would make him read it. And perhaps I would get from him, finally, an admission.

Shortly afterwards Harriet and I took our seats in a taxi. As we drove away I looked back and glimpsed Mrs Stone standing in her doorway, framed by golden light as if already in heaven.

That night, in our Liverpool hotel room, with Harriet mixing gin cocktails, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Mrs Stone had told us. I had a vision of Herbert writing letter after letter to Lord and never getting a reply. I imagined the pencils, the erasers, the discarded drafts, and wondered what words he’d used. I wondered what I would have written, had I been Herbert Stone writing to Stanley Lord.

From somewhere deep in my memory came the words of one of my countrymen, which I had learned by rote as a schoolboy. ‘O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done … O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up – for you the flag is flung – for you the bugle trills…’

*   *   *

‘Hello, hello! I am pleased that you have come,’ said Stanley Lord when he opened his door to Harriet and me two days later. The old captain’s home – a two-storey, pebble-stone terrace house with large bay windows – was only half a mile or so north of the house he’d lived in when I last saw him.

‘Thank you for agreeing to see me,’ I said. ‘This is my daughter, Harriet.’

Lord gave a low bow. He was now very thin, with sunken pits at his temples and cloudy white spots in his eyes. I was not sure how well he could see us. But even in the infirmity of old age there was something tough and unyielding about this man: the sags and folds of his face seemed only to emphasise the strong, hard bone of his skull underneath.

He led us into a warm, open living room with a large armchair, two couches and a gramophone. Small stained-glass panels glowed behind the lace curtains of the bay window; vases of flowers sat on its sill.

A puffy man of about fifty stood nervously by the window. He closed his hands into little fists, which he held beneath his chin, and smiled at me through lips drawn tight around two prominent front teeth. I knew at once who he was. He had his father’s baldness, and had pulled strands across his head and smoothed them down with hair cream.

Lord introduced the man as Tutty, his only child. ‘He is named Tutton,’ Lord said, ‘my wife’s maiden name.’ He spoke in slow, measured sentences, as if his son’s presence required a special explanation. Mrs Lord died two years earlier, Lord told us, but Tutty had never married and still lived at home, and so was able to care for him just as capably as his wife had. Nor had Tutty gone to the war; he would not have lasted long abroad, Lord said. It was much better that he stay put at home, where he could look after the garden and listen to opera on the gramophone.

‘Do you like the opera?’ Lord asked me.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I don’t much care for it.’

‘Neither do I,’ Lord replied with a chuckle, ‘but Tutty does, don’t you Tutty?’

Tutty said nothing, but hung up our hats and coats and led his father by the arm to the large chair. Harriet and I sat on one of the couches, Tutty went to make tea. Here, too, the walls around us bore framed photographs: Lord in full captain’s uniform on the bridge of a ship; Lord with his wife and Tutty on a beach promenade; Lord, Tutty and another man in a touring car.

I was a retired Harvard professor, Lord believed from the letter I’d sent him, researching a history of the nitrate trade, and by the time Tutty returned with the tea, Lord was speaking expansively about his years as a commander in the Nitrate Producers’ Steamship Company. He told us of the ships, the ports, the officers he’d sailed with. It was a special breed of men, he said, who worked in the trade: proud Englishmen with courage and initiative. He showed us a polished silver frame containing a reference from his employer. ‘
We regard him as one of the most capable Commanders we have ever had
,’ it read.

Harriet was charming. She listened, she praised, she asked questions. I marvelled at her storytelling. It was a perfect blend of fact and fiction; her transitions were so seamless that even I became confused. In one moment she joked about Harvard being located in a suburb called Cambridge, in another she awarded me the Beacon Hill Prize for Historical Writing. By her openness she encouraged Lord to be open; by her flattery she made his aged skin flush pink. She was an elixir, and he was young again. He spoke of the first war, when he’d almost sunk a German submarine, and of how he had become an expert in transporting horses. He sent Tutty out to find for us letters of commendation from the governments of America, France, and other places.

A large grandfather clock chimed away the quarter-hours. It was a pleasant scene: one old man sharing his memories with another, two dutiful children patiently listening. It was, as Lord himself might have described it, most convivial. But it was time for me to bring things into sharper focus.

‘You were also, I think, captain of the
Californian
?’

It was inelegant, and Lord turned sharply. He blinked and opened wide his cloudy eyes, and I had again the sense that perhaps he could not see me, that my daughter and I for him were only blurs and shadows.

‘I was,’ he said. ‘And what of it?’

I had to be careful. The scrap log page lay in my pocket, and I needed to find a way to make him read it. ‘I wondered only whether, perhaps, you’d kept up with any of the men you sailed with on that ship?’

‘No,’ said Lord. ‘None of them. I saw Mr Groves once – in Australia, I think it was – and Mr Stewart I saw some years ago in Liverpool.’ He sat thinking for a while. ‘The whole business was an outrage, of course.’

‘What business do you mean?’

‘The
Titanic
.’ He still pronounced the name in his own strange way,
Ti-
tar
-nic
. From his mouth it sounded like the name of a caustic chemical.

‘So Lord Mersey got it wrong?’

‘Of course he did. He wanted a bloody goat, and I was it. The whole thing is a damned shame.’

Lord now spoke freely and quickly: about how he’d been portrayed in the recent movie, how someone at the Mercantile Marine Service Association in Liverpool had helped him to lodge a formal complaint, how his name would soon be cleared once and for all. He didn’t need Lord Mersey or anyone else to tell him about the
Californian
and what she saw. He had
been
there, on the spot, and he knew they didn’t see any
Titanic
. A ship like that at sea was an utter impossibility to mistake.

His voice had grown in power and volume. Its deep timbre seemed to infuse every particle of air in the room with its vibration. He still had an uncanny power to possess a space. I was reminded of the way he’d enthralled the Boston pressmen with his lilting voice that flowed around us like a warm breeze. He seemed now as he did then: trustworthy, persuasive, believable. He was animated by his innocence.

‘But what about the rockets?’ I asked.

He turned to me slowly, as if he’d forgotten I was there. Tutty stood up, as a warning to me, perhaps, not to go too far.

‘The rockets?’ Lord repeated.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘The rockets seen by your ship.’

‘They were from another ship,’ he said. ‘Another ship firing rockets. My man at the association has worked it all out.’

I waited a moment to let his point settle. ‘And the ship seen by the
Titanic
– that was not you?’

‘Oh no.’

‘There were two ships, then, between you and the
Titanic
?’

‘Two ships.’

‘So, four ships altogether?’

‘Yes. Four ships!’

He was triumphant. He was looking over my head in his old way, as if addressing an audience in the middle distance. Harriet and I glanced at each other. She was as surprised, I think, as I was: we had expected anger from this man, or a refusal to speak at all about the
Titanic
, not this energy. Lord was in a heightened state; he seemed almost thrilled. There was not one sign of remorse, not a hint of regret, not a single note of sadness. There was still no admission that he’d done wrong, only a very great certainty that he was right.

Now, I thought, was the time to do what I’d promised Mrs Stone. But Tutty had moved to take up a position behind his father’s chair, and before I could reach into my pocket, he announced it was time for his father’s walk.

Tutty bustled us into his father’s old Austin and drove us to New Brighton, at the mouth of the Mersey. People of the Wirral, Tutty said, came here to breathe the sea air and be revived by the spirit of the great river. The water was vast and grey, but the lowering sun threw warm colours generously onto the opposite bank. We strolled slowly along a wide promenade. Harriet took the old captain’s arm to guide him gently, leaning her head into his shoulder from time to time. Tutty and I walked a few paces behind. His father’s eyesight was failing, Tutty said, and he had other problems too – his heart, his kidneys – but his legs were still strong.