Titanic Ashes (8 page)

“Evelyn, ” comes Father’s voice to her left. “Let’s return
to the table.” He touches her gently on the left shoulder
and her courage returns. She meets Mrs. Grimsden’s face
squarely once more, sees a glassiness over otherwise
triumphant eyes, a touch of a tremble about the lips. Her
gaze slips as she turns to Miranda, whose head is down,
eyes blinking wildly.

A thought comes to her, makes her throat and tongue
itch to free it. It’s a mad, extravagant thought that makes
her think of barred windows and padded cells, yet only
the calming presence of her father as he leads her back to
the table stops her from yelling it with all the force of her
lungs.

As he pulls out her chair, to the watching silence of the
dining room, the impulse becomes smothered—but
barely, uncomfortably, like swallowed air. And she regrets
this immediately, already wants to hear the shock that
would have greeted the words:
It’s a pity you weren’t all on
the
Titanic!

MIRANDA
’
S SKIN IS ALIVE
with pins and
needles, and the thought repeats over and over:
it’s
happened; it’s happened
. The words prickle between her
toes, dart like flies from her hair to the arcs at the top of
her ears, to her shoulders and down the back of her dress.

Father makes an astonished guffawing sound,
followed by, “Fancy!” and in a moment, sooner than she
might have expected, plates begin to tinkle again near and
far with the sound of cutlery. The gentle hum of conversation becomes a buzz. Miranda can feel the interest of
Graham, wants to meet his eye and gain comfort from the
sympathy his gaze always gives her. But she’s afraid to
look up, afraid to catch her mother’s eye.

It’s all her own doing, she knows. Belated as the
punishment might be, it’s Miranda whose actions
unleashed this misery and confusion. She set it in motion
with that letter, and kept it brewing again tonight, when
she ducked behind the shield of her mother, daring the
Ismays to strike.

“What extraordinary behaviour, ” Mother says after a
moment or two. “I really thought the girl was going to hit
me! What do you make of it, Miranda?”

Miranda looks up at last, feeling nauseated. She hasn’t
been picked for an opinion at random. When Mother asks
for her thoughts it’s always because she’s implicated in
something.

“I think she was angry, ” Miranda says quietly, wishing
that she could whisk Graham away, tell him all about her
childish letter to Mr. Ismay, her own feeling of shame and
horror, and all the misery and self-loathing that brought it
about in the first place. She wishes she could unburden
the whole story before her mother will get to torture her
with it. But she knows it’s too late, that humiliations will
likely unravel, and on her mother’s terms, without the
context that Mother would neither fully understand, nor
wish others to know about.

But it’s the context that swallows Miranda now as her
hand limply picks up her fork and pushes carrots around
on her plate. She’s in New York, thirteen years ago. It’s a
day or so after she cut and pasted the newspaper article.
A new superstition, and a fresh sense of mission, rushes in
her ears. She’s at the desk in the hotel suite’s little nursery
bedroom, looking beyond the avenue at the rolling foliage
in Central Park opposite the road. As the breeze captures
the branches, sets the leaves dancing, turning silver in the
sunshine, the huge oaks and beeches seem paternal and
wise, true guardians of mysteries and insights yet to be
unravelled. There are signs in everything, she thinks;
nature is sending these visions to her as her father’s emissaries. He needs her help just as she needs his.

She crumples the first letter, a simple desperate plea to
be rescued, and begins to scratch out another, more veiled
in the adult language she has been trying to emulate:

Mister Johnston has been so kind to Mother, they spend
all their time together. Everyone here thinks they are man
and wife!
Somewhere outside in the suite, the bedroom
perhaps, Mr. Johnston laughs in his extravagant way—
nothing is on an ordinary scale with Mother and Mr.
Johnston; it is as though they are playing out some great
drama requiring grand gestures and shimmering clothes.
Miranda has been hearing cupboard doors opening and
closing for some time; Mother and Mr. Johnston are
getting ready to go to the theatre, but she knows they can
take ages over preparations. Things might easily go quiet
again for twenty minutes or more, and then the sound of
footsteps and cupboards might begin all over again. They
can’t leave yet, anyway, as Jenny, who is supposed to mind
her, hasn’t arrived.

She hears the staccato clop of her mother’s tread quite
unexpectedly close to her nursery, then the door creaks
open. Miranda turns around and drops the pen.

“Miranda dear, ” Mother says loudly as though she
imagined an audience crouching in the shadowed corners
of the room. Her eyelids flicker oddly, as though shielding
herself from being looked at too directly. “Mr. Johnston is
about to escort me to the theatre where we are to meet
some friends of mine and your father’s. Will you be all
right until Jenny arrives to look after you?”

“Yes, Mother.” Miranda’s face stings with the heat;
Mother’s dress sways as she goes to leave, but then hesitates.

She bustles in and Miranda turns abruptly back to the
desk and leans over the letter so it won’t be visible.

“Why so secretive?” laughs Mother uneasily, laying her
hand upon Miranda’s shoulder. “What’s this?”

Miranda goes rigid. Mother eases her backwards with
surprising strength so that her forearms slide from the
letter, leaving it exposed. In the silence, Miranda’s vision
blurs. Beneath the urgent fear and shame flutters a wisp
of a true desire, that her reasons for acting as she does be
understood, that her mother see the loneliness, the confusion, and the fear. But it’s a feather before a tidal wave;
she knows what is coming. Before she has had time to
brace herself, she feels the blow, the sting of her cheek,
the sudden deafness in her right ear followed by a clear,
high note.

“I don’t understand you!” Mother whispers savagely.
Miranda catches the scent of her lipstick and perfume as
Mother pulls away the letter and crumples it. “I’ll never
understand you! Do you want it all to end? Do you? Do
you want your father to leave us? Do you want to live on
the street? Is that what you want?”

Miranda’s been breathing hard, keeping closed upon
herself like a hedgehog under attack. Now her mother
turns and strides away, she feels the tug, as though she’s
connected to her mother by a rope attached around her
waist. She feels the tears now rolling down her cheeks and
creeping into her mouth, and miraculously almost,
Mother turns.

“It’s that ship, ” she says softly kneading the crumpled
letter in her fingers as she speaks, “that dreadful voyage
has upset us all. I’m sorry, Miranda. We’ll spend the day
tomorrow, just the two of us.”

MOTHER
’
S GAZE REMAINS ON
her, amused and
questioning. The palm between their table and the Ismays
seems to shiver. Miranda’s eyes dart in that direction, half
expecting a second attack from Evelyn, but her view has
returned to the way it was when she first glanced at Mr.
Ismay. Again it’s that face bordered by an irregular star-shaped gap in the foliage, his face concerned, glassy-eyed,
intent upon his companion as he raises his fork to his lips.

“I could see she was angry, Miranda dear. I was
wondering if you had any other profound insight.” Her
voice has taken on that odd sing-song quality that confuses
newcomers to the Grimsden family, like poor Graham.
Miranda, however, knows it to indicate a sense of dissatisfaction, of not being sufficiently entertained by the people
with whom she sits. It is the voice of fading grandeur
bemoaning the present lack of ebullience, the inability to
see the dramatic potential in any given situation.

Miranda winces, and this time beneath her distaste for
her mother she feels the stirring of an anger that rather
scares her. She has so far treated this evening as an exercise in controlling others but feels suddenly, like an object
turning in the water to reveal contours unsuspected, she
may end up trying to control herself.

“No, Mother, ” she replies plainly, almost sulkily. “I
don’t have any profound insight beyond the obvious fact
that she doesn’t like her father to be talked about in a
negative fashion.” Her mother’s eyes narrow, seeing the
challenge, but still Miranda continues. “But that dreadful
voyage upset us all, didn’t it, Mother?”

This is the closest she has come in many years to bringing up the
Titanic
herself and alluding to her own
conduct, the letter she wrote to Mr. Ismay. It’s thrilling,
somehow, as well as terrifying, the idea that her own
personal taboo may be slipping. She feels its incredible
weight through its sudden absence. So many afternoons
and evenings she has spent in company with Mother flirting around the subject of Miranda and the
Titanic
—her
daughter’s strong belief in courage and cowardice, some
action connected with that belief—teasing forth the topic
with allusions subtle or daring, then moving the conversation abruptly away if a direct question is asked. Always
the guardian against her daughter’s pain, she then gives
Miranda her sympathetic look—the code a reminder for
the secret bond they share.

Now she’s come close to broaching the subject herself,
Miranda feels her shoulders and neck muscles loosening.
It’s no more than a taste of liberty, a slight dent in an
oppression sustained for so long, since September 1912, a
day after she sent the letter. Her imagination spins on the
thread of that memory now, the blood-thumping panic as
Miranda read those words—
libel, lawsuit, ruination
—in
one of Father’s newspapers. She’d been asked to fetch it
from the study, had been holding the broad sheets one
way, then another, unable to get the creases right, the way
Father liked it, when the words first caught her attention
and hauled her into the story of a businessman now claiming bankruptcy.

She stood there in the dim light, the hanging page
making a hushing sound against the leather of Father’s
chair, as she delved further into the world of adulthood
she had entered stealthily the day before. She had an idea
those three words might also be connected in some
unforeseeable way with her own communication to Mr.
Ismay, but the rush of terror was at first slow to come. She
read a few lines and creaked slowly toward the door, laid
the newspaper upon the carpet, planning to fold it again
properly, but read a little more, enough to realize that
libel occurred when one person said something bad
against another, and that ruination—
financial
ruination—
would come down upon the person who had spoken ill.

Father lived in dread of financial ruination. It had
occurred to some of his friends, and to Uncle John, and as
far as Miranda could tell, he arranged everything in his
life as a dam against any possibility of it occurring to him.
And without him knowing, she had already set this disaster in motion; the letter was on its way and she already
knew enough of schoolgirl pranks gone wrong to realize
she could not prevent its delivery. Frantic now with fear,
Miranda folded the newspaper inside out so that the football scores were on the crumpled outside. She rushed into
the sitting room, handed the sheath to Father, who took it
in surprise and laughed, then shot out of the sitting room
and into the hallway, flying up the stairs two at a time.

Mother was silent at the mirror when Miranda
entered, her breathing too urgent for words. When she
did manage to speak through gulps for air, what she said
made little sense to Mother or to herself. The confusion in
her mother’s eyes deepened into interest when she
managed to talk about the letter she had written, and then
softened into the warmth of a confidence between them
when she at last connected the whole episode to her fears
of reprisals in the courts.

“You were right to send the letter, Miranda, ” she’d said
soothingly, when she had drawn most of the content from
her daughter. “Mr. Ismay is a coward and you were brave
to challenge him.” She had sat Miranda down upon her
bed, and with a sense of privilege and luxury, Miranda
watched as her mother dressed herself for the evening.
They had a housekeeper and a maid and Mother had often
talked of a personal maid to help her dress, had always
rather disparaged her father for the fact they were without one. But Miranda was terribly happy there was no one
between the two of them as Mother’s underskirts rustled
between the wardrobe and the bed, as straps were
fastened and fabric smoothed. It all told Miranda that
what she had done, and who she was, matched an ideal
she carried in her head. “Don’t worry, Miranda dear, ”
Mother said, applying her lipstick. “He’ll never dare show
it, because it’s true. But don’t tell your father anyway. He’s
a worrier. All men are. It’ll be our secret.”

“
I KNOW IT ALL
upset
you
, Miranda, ” Mother says.
A quality appears in Mother’s eyes that Miranda doesn’t
recognize—something fluid and wavering. She guesses at
once that it must be fear.

“I did things I was ashamed of, yes, ” Miranda replies.

The wavering in Mother’s eyes intensifies. If she was
afraid a moment ago, Miranda thinks, this could only be
alarm. There was an unspoken second part to the state
ment, a symmetry left incomplete. I did things I was
ashamed of, yes, and so did you. Though oblivious of all
the meanings, Graham and Father have noticed something
too. Graham looks between Miranda and Mother, his
glance furtive and worried. Father coughs and looks
directly at his wife, which he hardly ever does, searching
for some clue. They can all feel it under their feet,
Miranda thinks, a sudden imbalance, something dangerous that may at any moment tip into confusion and ruin.

The realization is swift and, once achieved, infuriatingly obvious. It wasn’t accident or fate, or a psychological quirk of Miranda’s which chained her so decisively to
her own past actions. Mother forged those chains, deliberately, knowingly, because behind it all there was something altogether more pernicious, the memory of laughter
and sudden silence in a hotel suite, the creaking of a bed
past midnight. Now Miranda has disowned her shackles
and they have fallen, at least for the moment, and Mother
is panicking. They can all see that, even Graham, although
Father and he can hardly know the reason. And Mother in
a panic is terrifying because hers is the force that somehow keeps them all afloat.