Titanic Ashes (9 page)

ISMAY FEELS HIS DAUGHTER
’
S
agony as
though it were a fire burning him from the inside. The
look, pleading and helpless, she gave him when he
escorted her back to the table has remained, but now it’s
directed away from any human including himself.

“Sorry, ” she merely said to him as he took his seat
opposite.

“It doesn’t matter.” He shrugged, almost light-heartedly and meaning it for once. He
could
be carefree if it
would help her; it was a small enough price to pay for her
loyalty and love, and the people here would fade in
importance the moment they left the building. But so
great was the weight piled upon that single word of apology, Ismay was unable to prise her out from beneath it.

“You know, Evelyn, ” he says, watching her lift her fork
and lay it down again. “Most of us try to get through life
without being compromised, without ever being embar
rassed, which is an extraordinary thing if you think about
it, when there is so much war, so many disasters and
tragedies, real and man-made.” He doesn’t know where
he’s going with this speech, hears it as a listener would
hear it, without foreknowledge but with a vague sense of
its sincerity. “What you did just now is, in the eyes of the
world to which we belong, the worst kind of crime. But I
find it profoundly touching and I am very grateful.”

She looks up at last and gives him a sad smile.

As though to illustrate the point of her crime, a stern-faced waiter hovers behind her.

“Madam is finished?” he asks, white-gloved hand
reaching for her plate.

“I think not, ” Ismay says.

“Yes, I’m finished, ” says Evelyn, and the waiter snaps up
her plate and circles to Ismay’s side of the table. The wine
waiter converges upon them and swiftly fills their glasses.
The urgency around their table draws fresh glances.

Evelyn sighs as she turns to meet some of these faces,
and they look away quickly enough. Ismay is glad to see a
return of her sparkle.

“When will they stop trying to make you pay for it?”
she says.

“Never.” He lifts his glass, tips it in a mock toast and
sips. “But I did make that choice.”

“Now you sound like one of them.” She presses her
fingertips to her glass stem.

One of the waiters, the more surly of the two, has
taken a position close to their table, a yard or two behind
Evelyn. He stares straight ahead, and Ismay realizes there
is a strategy afoot to press them into an early exit. An
improbable rebellion bristles on the back of his neck. He
feels a sudden urge to frustrate their plans.

“I say, waiter, ” he calls. The man’s eyes grow alarmed
and it seems for a moment he plans to pretend he hasn’t
heard. Then, as though following direction from someone
behind Ismay, he nods and approaches the table. He
bends, with his ear close to Ismay like a conspirator. “We’d
like to see the dessert menu, please.”

The waiter, still with ear close to Ismay’s mouth,
makes a low sound as though considering how to respond.
He raises himself a little and shuffles backwards, aiming
his own comments somewhere just behind Ismay’s head.

“But, sir, we wondered whether you and madam
wouldn’t be more comfortable in your suite.”

“No, we would not, ” Ismay says.

He sees that Evelyn is beginning to shift, and already
has her gloves on the table. He throws her a slight frown
to make her stop.

“But as you can see, sir, we are very busy.”

“And as you can see, we have not finished.”

The waiter moves away without another word and
Evelyn obediently folds away her gloves.

Ismay catches a glance or two from adjacent tables.
The band returns, and he wonders at the shortness of the
break, whether they’ve been instructed to recommence to
smooth over the unpleasantness between Evelyn and the
Grimsdens. The leader waves his violin bow like a conductor’s stick and they strike into a mid-tempo waltz Ismay
doesn’t immediately recognize. It’s not “The Blue Danube”
but something quite similar.

“We’re both misbehaving tonight, aren’t we, Father?”

“Well, you know, one may as well be hung for a sheep.”

The image, ironically, makes him think of the ocean,
perhaps because it evokes notions of courage and
manhood, perhaps because it’s accompanied by a waltz
that feels like the motion of waves. He’s bent at the winch
handle once more, hearing the
pat
and
splash
as the
lifeboat touches down upon the water’s surface more than
sixty feet below. In a moment more the lifeboat is freed
and he’s racing with some other sailors to launch one of
the two collapsibles stored upon the boat deck.

Sounds of distant panic rise and fade, but mostly there
is an unreal sense of quiet and order even in the rush. It’s
a stomach-heaving calm because he knows it can’t possibly last. Soon there will be panic and agony beyond
anything he has ever imagined. Life doesn’t depart peacefully, even if it is one life trapped within the body of one
long-ailing. This will not be one, or ten, or a hundred, and
those to die are not ailing. They are merely aboard a ship
that cannot remain above the surface of the water.

Ropes are slung aside with a slap. Ismay helps throw
them clear. Carter, the friendly Philadelphian chap,
appears at his shoulder and throws him a sympathetic
look that makes Ismay wonder. On the one hand, there’s
hardly time to consider everything, on the other, there are
oceans of time. Every moment lasts forever. As a seaman
reaches his long spanner to a nut high on the davit and
turns it with a grunt, it seems that—in that swift glance—
Carter, a recent acquaintance, has suddenly acquired the
ability to read his thoughts. It feels as though he knows
Ismay is thinking of the decks below and the peace that
likely reigns in that place now that all the life of the ship
must have swarmed upwards. Boiler rooms, post rooms,
swimming pools, steerage, and many cabins aft will be
submerged and silent. His kingdom. The urge to go down
there tugs him so hard he almost feels himself dissolve
into the darkness between the cabin lights, making his
escape from the scene in a trail of vapour.

Carter catches his eye for a second time as collapsible
boat C shifts from its blocks with a yelp. Chief Officer
Wilde hands a lantern to a seaman on the far side and he
places it inside the lifeboat hull. The lifeboat sways from
its ropes as it hangs precariously from the deck. All the
boats so far have made it down, but this seems altogether
harder. The list is now so pronounced the lifeboat will
have trouble balancing from the ropes and could easily
scud against the side and tip over.

“Women and children first, ” Wilde shouts. Two or
three seaman join the first inside and get ready to
receive. There’s a pause from the huddled grey clump of
third-class passengers, then at last the bustle of movement, white funnels of breath, maybe two dozen or so
women in coats and several children, like young deer
among a herd, confused, quiet and moist-eyed. Shoes
clatter on hollow planking and the suspended lifeboat
sways ominously, davits creaking. A last circle of five or
six women and a few men stand on the deck, unwilling
to commit.

“How many for this boat, Mr. Wilde?” Ismay shouts.
He means to urge the undecided forward.

“Yes, more.” He waves his hand to encourage them on.
They go silently, gripping one another’s sleeves to keep
balanced. Hands reach out from the darkness of the
lifeboat hull, guiding the newcomers to a place.

“Lower away, ” he says. The davit creaks violently. The
rim of the lifeboat bumps hard against the ship’s side. The
winches this time are turned by seamen and Ismay feels
suddenly weightless on the deck, a man of no substance
whose avowed purpose is grinding to a halt. He eases a
half-step away, feeling Carter’s attention on him again,
knowing that if he is to disappear and go below, this is the
time—the catastrophe is closing upon them all.

“You have a wife and children, don’t you, Ismay?”

The voice is disembodied, emerging from a silence and
calm somewhere beyond the creaking of the davit and the
winch.

Ismay watches the heads jiggling upon shoulders as
the boat jerks slightly lower.

“Yes.”

He turns to catch Carter’s slightly bemused smile.

“Stop, ” Wilde calls. The men at the winches halt.
“Steady, a quarter turn.” Wilde gestures to the man at the
bow side. The lifeboat sways and evens up a little.

Silence is suddenly profound. Ismay turns to see the
bareness of the deck and the steepness of its incline. In a
few more minutes he will have to hold onto a railing merely
to stand. The sound of distant thumps, rattles, and crashes
punctuate the hush. And he knows the noise will increase
like an orchestra tuning up before a performance. He
knows it will reach a cacophony, and that agony and death
will surely follow, on the ship, in the water, in the lifeboats,
perhaps, should the sinking ship carry them under, should
the sea become choppy, should the racing
Carpathia
not
find them. And that this will only be the beginning.

The shock will carry over the airwaves. The staccato
beat of wireless will transmit the news via Cape Race: that
one of the largest steamships in the world has been swallowed whole by the glassy Atlantic; that the sinking was
slow enough to provide for an evacuation of the passengers by lifeboats.

How long will it take them to fill in the rest of the
story, that the lifeboats could hold far fewer than half the
two thousand or so on board? The early optimism will
make the blow of reality harsher. The true horror of it will
unfold through agonizing, incremental stages. Printed
news of the sinking might appear as early as the morning
in New York, in the late editions in London. The first
editorials will quiver with uncertainty, but press the need
for calm. But after the lifeboats are reached—please
God—the survivors counted, the news will likely change.
A catastrophe becomes real only when news of it is
communicated. This one will come to life with the dailies,
the phone calls, and the urgent worry of it all.

The relatives of passengers, of officers and men, stewards, stewardesses, valets, cooks, and staff will gather at
notice boards outside the Southampton office, the New
York office, the London office. Reporters will mill among
the grief-stricken. His own—his Julia, Tom, Margaret,
Evelyn, and George—will huddle at home, awaiting the
phone call or wire.

But none of it has happened yet, so none of it is real.
If he skips away now, if he weaves downwards into the
ship away from the familiar, through steerage, into the
bowels, he will be able to un-imagine it all. He will die as
Thomas Ismay’s son and heir, a man always destined to
out-build his father. He will exit the world a success. The
new world, the one of agonizing pain and unmitigated
disaster, will be forever unborn.

Something breaks the quiet, no more than a murmur
really, from the jerking collapsible C, but he catches the
words.

“Someone will have to pay, that’s for sure.”

He finds himself nodding silently in agreement, as
though he were a passenger, quite outside his own
clothes. Recompense does indeed follow a tragedy that
has been inflicted by human agency. Hard-earned money
paid everyone’s passage on this magnificent ship, whether
it is the first-class industrialist’s family, the second-class
headmaster, or the humble steerage passenger hoping to
build a life as a fruit farmer somewhere in the great
American interior. They gave the White Star Line their
money and their trust. In the tipping deck, the violently
creaking davits, in the distant thunder of falling lamps
and tables, he feels injustice and betrayal just as they do.
There’s something comforting in the truism: someone will
have to pay; it’s solid and reliable like the ground beneath
one’s feet when all else is scattered.

It takes a while, though less than a second perhaps, for
Ismay to realize that the “someone” referred to can only
be him. The speaker, whose face now drops almost level
with the deck, didn’t know that, of course; she likely doesn’t know who he is, yet it mars the oblivion of which he’s
been dreaming. His father built ships and so did he. But
everything has changed. He remembers the image of Saint
Sebastian from his Religious Studies school book, the
tortured face and the dozen or so fiery arrows burning
into his skinny flesh. This is the future beyond this
moment should he choose to live through it. He must pay.

“Hold it!” cries Wilde to one of the seaman. “Slower
your end. Wait, wait, crank it back an inch and start
again.”

The lifeboat rim thumps against the hull again and
seamen inside push carefully with the paddle end of their
oars to keep it clear.

“Well, Ismay?” says Carter. “What about it? There’s no
one else on deck.”

Has the man been reading my thoughts again? Ismay
wonders. Carter lifts his hands, palms out, as though to
signal futility, then with the careless ease and balance of
an athlete steps onto the boat.

“Trouble, Mr. Wilde?” asks First Officer Murdoch.
Ismay hadn’t noticed him approach and wonders now
whether Murdoch is making reference to Carter, who is
now seated.