Every Man for Himself (11 page)

When we came at last to the engine and boiler rooms, only Smith, Andrews and the chief engineer were allowed access. The rest of us went off to examine the refrigeration area and the cargo holds, through which we tramped to the pinging of that ghostly violin.

Twenty minutes later the engine room detail emerged into the corridor, Andrews mopping his brow, droplets of perspiration sparkling in the Captain’s beard. Their glowing faces gave nothing away and neither a reference to fire nor any expression of doubt as to the stability of bulkheads was made in my hearing.

Midday, we rose to the upper levels and gave our attention to the enclosed promenades. Andrews was concerned that a number of steamer chairs had gone from the port side. He instructed me to make a note of it. I hadn’t a pencil and turned my back on him, pretending to scribble. Fortunately the missing items were spotted moments later piled behind the door of the Café Parisien. Starboard side, the small grandson of Mrs Brown of Denver was caught finger-drawing on the windows. Told to desist, he put out his tongue. His nurse rubbed the glass clean with her handkerchief and shooed him below.

Once on the boat deck there was a wearisome trudge of its length and an even longer scrutiny of its cranes, winches and ventilators. All were judged to be in good working order. As we passed the base of the forward mast the look-out men of the crow’s nest were changing shifts. The two men coming off duty were arguing about a pair of missing night-glasses, one claiming he’d seen them when the ship left Cherbourg, the other adamant he’d not set eyes on them from the day he’d signed on. I heard their exchange quite clearly because our procession had come to a temporary halt while Thomas Andrews greeted Mr and Mrs Carter who were taking a stroll before lunch.

We were further delayed when it came to an inspection of the life-boats, of which there were twenty, including four Englehardt collapsibles, Captain Smith wishing to know if they were sufficiently stocked with emergency blankets. Smiling, the chief steward submitted that they were and had been double checked. All the same, Smith insisted Number 7 boat be lowered immediately so that he could see for himself. Bored with this procedure Andrews strode off before it was completed and led us towards the bows.

I had been waiting impatiently for the moment when we would go up on to the bridge and view the marvels of modern technology within the wheelhouse, and actually had, at last, one foot on the companionway when Andrews, spying a female figure squatting beside a bench midway beneath the first and second funnels, suggested that someone should go to her assistance. As I had turned to hear what he said and it chanced he was looking straight at me, I was in no position to dodge the request.

The woman was middle-aged and wrapped in furs against the wind. Eccentrically balanced on her haunches, she peered intently at the deck. Upon my enquiring if she had lost anything she pointed at what I took to be a button stuck to the side of the bench bolt. As I bent to pick it up I caught a glint of sliver slime and realised it was a species of mollusc.

‘Please don’t pull it,’ cried the woman. ‘It must be detached with the utmost gentleness.’

My efforts weren’t altogether successful; there was an audible plop as I prised the thing free.

‘What is it?’ I asked, thinking she must be some sort of authority on crustacea.

‘Possibly a snail?’ she questioned, looking at me for affirmation.

We both stood there, gazing down at the object cupped in my hand. I wanted very much to get away and join the others on the bridge. I made as if to tip it into her own hand but she drew back, clutching her furs about her throat.

‘Young man,’ she said, ‘I’m late for luncheon. Be so good as to take the creature indoors and place it in the earth of one of the potted palms.’

I stood at the rail and watched her go, and when the doors swung to behind her tossed the snail overboard. The day was dull, a long smudge of pale light dividing the grey sea from the grey sky. On the horizon a toy boat sat beneath a scribble of smoke. Sprinting back along the deck I was in time to see the design team descending the companionway and moments later our patrol was dismissed.

I went immediately to the smoke-room, found Scurra alone reading a book, and ordered a drink. He observed I looked put out. I told him I’d been all over the ship and having come within yards of the one place that interested me, namely the bridge, had been sent off to deal with a crazy old woman mooning over a snail.

‘She ordered me to take it to the lounge,’ I said. ‘To feed off the palms.’

‘But of course you did no such thing. You threw it overboard.’

I was startled, suspecting he’d actually seen the incident.

‘And that’s not all, is it?’ he added. ‘Come now, be straight with me. Conversation is useless, don’t you think, unless one addresses the truth.’

Though hesitant, at first, scarcely having known until then that the truth was at issue, or indeed in what way I’d been evasive, I soon got the hang of it and poured out more than I intended. This was partly due to his skill in drawing me out and partly because of the heady satisfaction to be gained from talking about oneself. I told him of the fire in the stokehold, my dream of the night before, my involvement with Tuohy in Belfast, my glimpse of Ginsberg with his hand on Wallis’s waist. I left out, in connection with the fire, Tuohy’s belief that it was legitimate to use sabotage in the struggle for Irish Home Rule, along with his conviction that the ends always justify the means.

Scurra interrupted from time to time, seeking clarity on this or that statement, demanding further details, correcting assumptions. For instance, when I said the Socialist meetings I had attended had shaken my soul and convinced me of the truth of Marx’s theory that the real value of commodities lay in the labour embodied in them, he brought me up sharp, insisting that the value of any given product was in direct proportion to demand, and though the theory of surplus value was generally expounded with special reference to capitalistic production, in reality it was independent of the system.

‘One must distinguish,’ he said, ‘between use-value and exchange-value. The air we breathe seldom has exchange-value, but always high use-value, being necessary to life. Philosophically speaking, life may be said to have use-value, but only for the individual. Its exchange is death, which has no value whatsoever unless one is in severe torment.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘one should substitute worth for value, the latter word leaning too strongly towards the notion of goodness.’

‘A point well made,’ he said.

At which I glowed with pleasure, though not for long, for he proceeded to tear my new-found beliefs to shreds, not by demolishing the ideas themselves but rather by questioning my own capacity for sound judgement, the young, he asserted, being prey to delusions, awash with misplaced guilt and only too prone, by virtue of unexplained chemical changes and immortal longings, to be struck by the lightning bolt of giddy ideals. He wasn’t unkind or dismissive; he eyed me with affection while he laid me bare.

‘But I must believe in something,’ I heard myself plead, ‘some purpose . . . some cause . . .’

‘Of course you must,’ he soothed. ‘It’s essential at your age. You’ll grow out of it as the years pass.’

‘But I don’t want to grow out of it. There has to be a new way of living . . . a different way of . . .’

‘Of what, exactly?’

‘Of men being equal—’

‘But they’re not equal,’ he said. ‘Nor is it desirable that they should be. What would be the value of St Peter’s in Rome if every other church in the world was of the same shape and dimensions? What price the flowers in the garden if each were of the same height and colour?’

‘I’m talking about people,’ I retorted. ‘Not flowers.’

‘It’s entirely to be expected,’ he said, ‘that a young man such as yourself, rich, pompous, ignorant of the lives of the general mass of humanity, should find himself so persuaded.’

‘I haven’t met any others,’ I protested. ‘You wouldn’t find Ginsberg or any of the chaps I know worrying about the working man and the worth of his labour.’

‘I was talking about you,’ he said. ‘Your temperament sets you apart. That and your beginnings. Which is why your dream was so explicitly symbolic of darkness and danger.’

I was taken aback that he should be so blunt. Though I supposed some of my uncle’s generation were acquainted with the facts of my early life, none had come out with it so plain. It’s true that old Seefax had crossed the line the evening before, but then he could be excused on the grounds of near senility.

‘Last night,’ I said, anxious to change the subject, ‘Mr Seefax told me a confused story about a woman crawling along the outside of a train. You know how he rambles. He said it was in Madrid, where he met you.’

‘So it was . . . at a reception given by the Ambassador. Seefax was negotiating with some arms manufacturer and I was attending the trial of Madame Humbert. An extraordinary case, don’t you think?’

‘I didn’t understand it,’ I confessed.

‘She made up a pack of lies about saving the life of a wealthy American who was having a heart attack in the next carriage. Hearing his groans and finding the door to his compartment locked, she claimed to have climbed out of the window and gone to his aid. Later, she produced letters purporting to have come from him, promising he would leave her his fortune. All forged, of course. There never was an American, rich or otherwise. On the strength of these letters she lived the life of Madame Pompadour until found out. An ingenious woman, don’t you agree?’

‘Very,’ I said. ‘If shameful.’

‘Except in degree, no more shameful than your own action of earlier this morning.’

‘What action was that?’ I demanded, shocked.

‘Pretending to come to the aid of an elderly woman and consigning a snail to the depths,’ he said, smiling gleefully. ‘Both acts are the product of thoughtlessness and from the snail’s point of view yours is the more reprehensible.’

We both laughed, he so much so that he had to blot his eyes with a none too clean handkerchief. Recovering, he asked why I didn’t declare myself to Wallis. ‘At your age,’ he said, ‘you have nothing to lose. She can either respond favourably or let you down gently. Very few women are deliberately cruel. It’s not in their natures. Besides, all women thrive on admiration.’

I said I wouldn’t know what words to use. Wallis was such an unapproachable girl, so downright pure and straight.

‘Good heavens,’ he murmured. ‘How extraordinarily little you know about women, and that one in particular.’

We didn’t lunch together; he said he wasn’t hungry and preferred to nap until tea-time. It wasn’t until he’d gone that I realised he’d told me nothing about himself.

At lunch, Hopper fell out with Ginsberg. It was quite a spat and became so heated that Guggenheim sent Kitty Webb over to tell them to lower their voices. I wasn’t present myself and only heard of it second-hand from Hopper when I ran into him and Melchett on my way to the library later that afternoon. Hopper admitted that at one point it had nearly come to blows. Of course, they’d all drunk a fair amount. Molly Dodge had burst into tears.

‘Molly?’ I said incredulously.

‘Ginsberg was raving on about the German navy again,’ Melchett explained. ‘That and the fiendish nature of the German character. He’s an awful bully when he gets on his hobby horse. He said the Kaiser was a madman and out to ruin us all.’

‘Why the devil should Molly care what Ginsberg thinks of the Kaiser?’ I asked, bewildered.

‘On account of her mother being German,’ said Hopper. ‘A fact Ginsberg kept dinning into her. He held all Germans were crazy, her mother in particular . . . she shot herself, if you remember . . . I tried to quieten him . . . Molly was trembling . . . but he called me a bloody fool and said I was too damned blind to see which way the wind was blowing.’

‘She never knew her mother,’ I said.

‘I jumped up, suggested we go outside to sort the matter out, and Kitty Webb came over to see what was up.’

‘Ginsberg backed off,’ said Melchett, ‘because of Guggenheim. The man’s a frightful crawler.’

‘The mother killed herself,’ I said, ‘when Molly was two months old.’

‘One’s mother is always sacred,’ Melchett said primly. ‘Whether one knew her or not.’ It wasn’t a remark I could argue with.

In the hope of finding inspiration in some poetry book, I was all set on going to the library to write a letter to Wallis. Needless to say, I didn’t breathe a word of my intentions to either Melchett or Hopper. They were off down to G deck for a knockabout on the racquets court and pestered me to join them. At first I argued, protesting I had more important things to do, and then gave in, fearing they might harass me to the point where I gave myself away.

The steward was in my stateroom when I went there to change, unlocking the porthole. He said he’d be back in an hour to close it, once the fresh air had circulated. He was flushed in the face and none too steady on his feet, but I let it go. His was a servile enough position and I reckoned he needed a prop to sustain him.

It wasn’t an evenly matched game. F. White was on duty on court and made up a pair with Melchett. The two of them were streets ahead of Hopper and me, White being a professional and Melchett having excelled at the game during his years at Eton. He had a powerful backhand and a beautiful turn of wrist. When he flung up the ball and lent his head back to serve, his teeth gleamed under the lights. Though he should have known better, White kept calling out, ‘Excellent stroke, sir,’ and smirking.

Hopper was too tiddly to hit the ball straight on; his shots went all over the place. As a second string he was a liability and in the middle of the fourth game, our opponents well on the way to winning a love rubber, I lunged forward and felt a stinging blow to my head, either from his racquet or the belt of his trousers, and staggered about the court, blood streaming from a cut above the eye. It wasn’t serious and we hadn’t had a hope of winning, but I groaned a bit to let Hopper stew. I have never been foolish enough to believe it’s the game that counts.