Titanic Ashes (4 page)

He feels annoyance rising to anger, but falling just as
quickly to nothing. How could he really expect anything
different? The
Titanic
is, after all, the knot at the centre of
all their lives. She hasn’t named the event, poor girl. She
doesn’t need to.

Evelyn, he suspects, was hoping to keep their conversation this evening to the subject of Basil Sanderson.
Ismay knows Evelyn and Basil plan to marry. He knows
also that his own approval would mean a great deal to
her, but that she is looking for far more than a consent he
has already implicitly given. Some kind of dynastic sentiment among his family, touchingly ancient and impractical, longs for healing through marriage lines. With Basil,
the White Star Line’s likely future chairman, and Evelyn,
the house of Ismay would once again be realigned with its
proud maritime heritage. Through this plan—and Ismay
has no doubt all the appropriate bonds of affection and
love came before the other serendipitous aspects of the
match—Evelyn and perhaps Julia and Margaret expect a
great balm to be applied to the disgrace suffered by
himself and the family. In short, they expect it to make
him better again.

Ismay tries to greet his daughter’s question with an
amused smile. “My dear, I am enjoying myself immensely.”
The sentiment, coming with a genuine-sounding surprise,
almost convinces even him. Evelyn sighs gently and smilingly raises her eyebrows. It’s the expression of a teacher
who has just failed to catch her pupil in the act. They both
know of the misdemeanor, the look says, but as it cannot
be proven she will drop the matter. Ismay smiles once
more, is about to drop his gaze to his plate, when something—an exclamation, a flitting shadow and the clink of
glass—makes him turn first to the Palm Room entrance,
then to the opposite end of the hall, where there are fresh
shrieks and gasps. Evelyn cranes her neck too, catching
his eye, questioning. More diners react, looking upward, it
seems. Cutlery clinks. The band stops playing. Laughter
comes in a wave and a waiter positions himself, silver tray
dangling from his hand as though for a catch on the rugby
field. All heads turn again in unison, and Ismay, trying to
follow the cause of the interest, catches the flick of wings
overhead, the darting brown body of a sparrow as it sinks
into the foliage of the palm tree closest to them. Some of
the men are now on their feet. Three or four waiters
converge, hovering uncertainly as they come close to the
palm. One claps his hands; the man with the tray waves
at the bird with his gloved free hand like a policeman
directing traffic.

Ismay realizes he must have shifted his own seat. His
view through the palm has changed. Without any obvious
cover of leaf or stem he finds himself staring directly into
the small, dark eyes of Mrs. Grimsden.

She makes no sign of recognition at first, and neither
does he, but the blankness of expression carries a full
awareness, even a kind of static acknowledgment, of the
situation and the history. Gradually something changes.
As the waiters converge gingerly upon the palm and the
bandleader counts his musicians off to start again, Ismay
neglects to take his eyes from Mrs. Grimsden, not from
any desire to face her down, but simply through an inability to think where else he ought to put his own gaze. Her
eyes narrow further, and her mouth seems to harden.

If, before this evening, someone had told Ismay that a
woman could take ‘a violent sip of water’ he would have
told them such an action made no sense, that they were
colouring the movements they witnessed with their own
fears and prejudices. But this is the only description that
aptly conveys the way Mrs. Grimsden now jerks the drink
to her lips, tips back her head and returns the glass to the
table, her hand still clutching its stem. Still he doesn’t look
away, this time for a different set of reasons: for one thing
he can’t; her behaviour is both bewildering and fascinating, so much apparent emotion, such need to express
corseted tightly within the constraints of an entirely
public setting. Only by forcing malignity into her face and
imbuing the most commonplace of movements with a
kind of frantic energy can she hope to convey the true
level of her indignation. The effect seems vaguely comic,
especially with the band now recommencing its program
with a jaunty, fast-tempo number. Indeed it
would
be
comic, worthy of a scene from a Charlie Chaplin film, if
only he were not himself the object of her anger.

He knows what she wants, and does not believe in
being pointlessly bullheaded. But to look away now would
be giving away something he has yet to concede, although
he has been under far greater pressure than this. It would
be saying,
Yes, I am a coward and I am ashamed. You have
every right to stare and judge
. Even now, after the great
trauma of the
Titanic
and the weight of judgment that
came down upon him in its wake, he has done himself the
service not to buckle in this regard. It is a habit with him
now. He will stand his ground until the moment he drops.

His daughter’s hand comes upon his arm, compelling
him to tear his gaze away at last. She leans across the table
with a kind of appeal in her eyes. Of course, he thinks, she
has seen the Grimsdens, has likely been aware of their
presence all this time, hence the solicitous manner, the
open, yet leading, questions— “
What are you thinking
about now? Don’t you think you deserve to just enjoy yourself without brooding about things
?” He would like to tell
her it doesn’t matter, that he also has been aware of them
all evening, except of course, that it does matter, clearly,
and he would never say anything of the kind to his daughter even if it were true. Never have the Ismays talked
openly about anything to do with the accusation of
cowardice levelled against Ismay after the
Titanic,
nor
even about the effect such accusations have had upon him.

Evelyn’s eyes are moist, but she is smiling—a fluid,
desperate smile.

“Don’t worry, Father, ” she says, turning her eyes pointedly upward toward the chandelier, almost magically
drawing his own in the same direction. The sparrow darts
one way, then the other, causing the crystal to tingle.
“They won’t hurt it, ” she says. They watch together as the
bird switches direction again, circling the ceiling fan, then
dips, making a young lady duck and shriek with delight.
With a flick of the wings it then flies straight as a bullet
toward the foyer. The diners break into spontaneous
laughter and applause. The waiters still encircling the
palm look suddenly redundant and sheepish at the
clamor, as though left on stage to receive praise that
belongs to another. Evelyn claps, eyes twinkling at her
father. Ismay joins in, feeling a genuine kind of relaxation
with his laughter, but knowing with that dim instinct for
trouble he has always possessed that the relief will not
last.

MIRANDA MUST HAVE BEEN
the only diner in the
room not following the course of the sparrow as it flitted
around the palm and circled the chandelier. She fixed her
stare first at her own fingers on the stem of her glass, then
turned to the ornate entrance with the Grecian-looking
plants trailing over the gilding, then at a mirror on the far
wall, anywhere but at the wretched bird which hovered
and ducked between them and J. Bruce Ismay.

Even with her best efforts to try and distract herself,
the spellbound faces of the diners and waiters told her
where the sparrow was. She could guess at the sight
which must have revealed itself to her mother, explaining
her ominous change of expression. She took her eyes from
the far mirror, glanced at Mother and saw her eyes
darken. In spite of herself, Miranda tilted her head far
enough to allow her peripheral vision to scan the Ismays’
table. There was one person opposite, a young woman in
an ivory silk dress. This could only be one of the daughters who had been so nice to her when she and her
parents had visited them in Mossley Hill. She now takes a
second peek at the dark hair, angular features, and
decides it must be Evelyn, the younger of the two, much
more grown up than she was at the time, but nearer to
being her contemporary all the same.

She could never remember the details, or even much
about the event, but the kindness and the fuss, the easy
acceptance into the world of older girls had stayed with
her. Like a flower in glass, the day was a timeless record
of a specific youthful vision; it was her child’s conception
of the shining adult or near-adult world to which she
would one day belong. Everything was felt intensely by
Miranda in those days; she categorized events and people
as fragments of paradise or of hell. Life as it was, with its
long creaking silences in church or in the classroom, was
most often dull, belonging decisively to the latter column;
the future, however, offered glimpses of something different, a thousand forbidden, sparkling tales, the details of
which were always obscure.

She had tried to fill in these details of her imagined
worlds, but knew something failed her. Her daydreams
always carried the dust and tedium of her own present
life. Her heroines were too much like school teachers,
exuding the coarse fluff of tweed, speaking too sternly,
because she could imagine no other kind of women—
except for her mother, and in those days Mother was a
distant, regal figure in her daydreams, too potent to be
engaged in the action, but watching from the clouds. The
heroes moved and talked with the mannerisms of factory
managers, again because she could visualize no other kind
of successful man. She tried to paint her sword-brandishing knights with the sheen of glamour, but always a
dangling watch chain, a bulging waistcoat, or thinning
hair would impose itself upon the picture. She knew
herself to be a poor dreamer, and her details always killed
the magic. But the Ismay girls had brought her so much
closer to the formless vision of paradise that dwelt within
her. Their house in Mossley Hill—she already knew they
had several, one in Ireland, one in London—was a place
of high, curved banisters, muted colours, darkness and
wood polish. The train set they brought her up to see was
older and clunkier than the ones she had seen before, the
tracks wooden and aromatic, and although they were so
much older than she was, they approached it all with
simple joy, and no sense of ownership or jealousy or any
indication they believed it beneath them to play with a
train set. They treated her as if she were one of them, and
with their soft, pleasant manners, long, slender limbs, hair
that shone even in the dimmest light, and scent of unmistakably feminine soap, she longed to be their sister.

She watched Evelyn as she adjusted and retied her
bow, gathering strands which glowed like water through
her fingers. Miranda sensed somehow the subject of hair
was like a secret door giving passage into another world,
their
world, and that if she asked in the right way at the
right time, this world would open up to her, at least for
the afternoon. When she did pluck up the courage, spilled
just a few dry syllables while fingering the wood of a chair
leg, it all came so easily she wondered how she could have
been nervous about it. Margaret and Evelyn had her
sitting in front of the nursery window, brushing her own
hair, tying her own yellow and blue bows in a similar style
to their own, giggling and arguing in a way that was
somehow polite, the way that adults argued, using each
other’s names—Margaret and Evelyn—nicely, carefully, as
though they rather liked the words. There, feeling the
gentle pull of the brush, seeing her strands of hair fall
against the sunlight, intense through the window, she felt
she was entering into a magical universe.

The only thing worse to her than coming face to face
with Mr. Ismay again would be coming across him in the
company of one or more of those pretty daughters who
had once been so nice to her. She wonders now whether
it was precisely
because
they had been so pleasant to her
that she acted as she did. Such things are written about so
often these days; one has only to pick up a newspaper to
hear some secondhand account from an Austrian
psychotherapist who believes people are compelled to act
in a way directly contrary to their own best interests and
desires. Were the minds of women and men always so
tangled? she wonders. Or is this a recent thing brought
about by too many jolts, like a poison floating in the ether
after an explosion? As she tries to make sense of the idea,
she remembers another afternoon, weeks after the
Titanic
,
a restful hotel suite in New York, overlooking the great
rolling park. She hears again the rustle of newspaper
pages on carpet, an unendurable sound to her normally,
but today, on her knees, scissors in hand, she is forcing
herself to endure it. She has been cutting out words from
a slightly yellowed copy of
The Denver Post
, dated 19 April
1912. Mr. Johnston brought it with him when he arrived
the day before yesterday with parcels of new clothes for
her and her mother, and he read it aloud. The article, he
told her, was written by his boss, and although it mentions
no names at all, Mother later assured Miranda, through
hushed lips, that it was about Margaret and Evelyn’s
father. It talks of the nobility and self-sacrifice of the brave
men who looked after women and children and then
stood calmly upon the deck of the
Titanic
as they went
down to glory. “Who, ” the article ends by asking, “would
not rather die than live a coward?” Miranda understands,
but only just, that this must be the part about Mr. Ismay.

The article itself has now been reduced to meaningless
phrases like “500 feet in the air, ” “that the, ” “might be, ”
“lapse of years, ” “would not rather, ” while the words
which carry emotion and promise drama— “graves, ”
“disaster, ” “desolate, ” “children, ” “glorious, ” “kissed, ”
“doomed, ” “hero, ” “coward, ” and she thought for good
measure, as the lettering was so large and in bold, the
author’s name, Mr. Johnston’s boss, “WILLIAM, ”
“RANDOLPH, ” and “HEARST”—are all either scattered on
the carpet or glued onto a flat, square piece of cardboard
she cut from a gift package.

Miranda’s experiment is to cut out and randomly
select words from the article, creating, she hopes, a new
and revelatory meaning upon the cardboard surface. All
of this is done by touch; her eyes are closed. Already she
has it in her head that she might emerge from the experiment with a coded message, one of comfort perhaps,
which might be sent to the Ismay girls. Even her mother,
who is definitely in agreement with the article’s author,
has expressed regret at the suffering some of the press
coverage might have caused the girls and their mother.

When Miranda opens her eyes, she sees a hodgepodge
of words, some, from the headline and from the writer’s
name, large and blocky; some, from subheadings, like
little brothers to the blocky ones; and some, from text too
insignificant, by comparison to the bolder script, to notice.
This seems unfair, as it was these— “coward, ” “monuments, ” “self-sacrificing”—that made her pulse race with
the promise of some kind of answer, some revelation for
which she is searching. It’s a disappointment, and now,
hearing murmurs of her mother and Mr. Johnston from
the living room of the suite, her heart picks up with a little
fear.

Mother has not specifically told her she should
not
cut
up the gift box from Mr. Johnston’s extra little present to
her mother—the rose set in glass—but she can be oddly
sentimental about such things, especially with Mr.
Johnston. A strange and rarified air seems to hang around
her when the two of them are together, and Miranda is
frightened of the change. Mother’s eyes seem both
intently focused on Mr. Johnston yet far away from everything, as though she’s a woman in a painting dreaming of
some distant mountain range. She has taken to speaking
differently too, enunciating more carefully and rising to a
sing-song pitch. There is more fuss about her clothes and
jewelry, or Miranda is noticing it more; she applies lipstick
more carefully and more often, and Miranda hears the
clicking of pearls and the ruffling sound of the whitish
dress she’s recently purchased for herself with its many
fairy-like folds. This all suggests that everything, even
cardboard boxes and newspapers, may have become
precious and important, dipped as they must have been in
this enthralling dream that seems to have descended upon
her world. Miranda imagines the horrified expressions on
both of their faces if Mother and Mr. Johnston were to
come into the nursery now and see the mess she has made
with Mr. Johnston’s newspaper and with the gift box.

Frantically she begins to gather it all together, unused
paper hissing against the carpet as she tries to scoop all
the scraps into the remains of the box, along with her own
pasted sections upon the cardboard square. The word
“coward” stares at her, white glue seeping from under its
bottom right corner. Although the letters loom at her as an
accusation, the word carries her thoughts like an arrow
far away, across the ocean, skimming past Mr. Ismay—the
writer’s intended target—merely ruffling his hair a little as
it flies, then sinking quite unexpectedly into the fond old
chest of her father as she sees him in her imagination,
slumped forward at his study desk, dozing. It unsettles
her, and she immediately tries to remember him in attitudes of authority, seeing how his employees approach
him, with soft treads and deference, nodding at his words
and colouring slightly as they speak. He’s a powerful man,
a brave man, she tells herself, yet visions of her mother
like a great, mocking butterfly—a cabbage white in that
rustling dress of hers—interfere. She hears the laughter of
Mother and Mr. Johnston from the suite’s living room.

AS THE GENERAL LAUGHTER
at the poor bird’s
departure dies into titters, Miranda begins to rummage in
her head for topics that will keep her mother from the
inevitable. She knows it’s useless even to try, that when it
comes to words her own arsenal would be like a pistol
opposing an army of tanks.

She latches on to the sight of the waiters returning to
their posts, the tray dangling from the gloved hand. The
silver catches the chandelier lights in a way that’s quite
painful. “I don’t know what the waiters were hoping to
do, ” she says hastily and mainly to Graham. “They looked
more afraid than the poor bird.”

As soon as the words leave her lips, she realizes the
danger. She has left an opening for her mother.

“Some men are afraid of everything, ” Mother says in a
voice designed to carry far beyond the table.

Before she came to England and married, Mother said
she had acted upon the stage in Halifax, and in times of
emotional stress she still has the uncanny ability to throw
her voice without yelling. It’s quite impossible to ignore
her, and Miranda knows that the quizzical silence from
Father and Graham will stretch time and focus attention
from all around upon the speaker. Mother bends the laws
of physics. It doesn’t matter that, in a technical sense, the
silence runs forwards, rather than backwards, in time. The
words will hang in the air, leaving their imprint. In the
hush around it, Miranda can’t imagine how the Ismays
will fail to hear.