Every Man for Himself (3 page)

‘Very mysterious, sir,’ he said, ‘seeing we’re at full muster and fewer passengers than expected owing to cancellations. Mr Vanderbuilt, sir, telegraphed only yesterday, although his luggage and valet are already aboard. I gather his mother, Mrs Dressler, has an aversion to maiden voyages. Same with Mr Frick, sir, and family, down as joining us at Cherbourg . . . now there’s a gentleman and no mistake.’

‘Yes, indeed,’ I agreed; my endorsement was insincere. When I graduated from Harvard my uncle had approached Frick with a view to my being slotted into the steel magnate’s empire. Choosing to sound me out in the vulgar cha^teau he had built for himself on Fifth Avenue rather than his office, he put me at a disadvantage, for his drawing room was so gloomy with panelled oak and the windows so obscured with velvet drapes that I failed to notice his sleeping Pomeranian. Paws stepped upon, it scuttled squealing under the ottoman. The mishap undid me, for though I expressed concern, indeed sorrow, it was reported that my mouth smiled. There followed a brief lecture in which ‘bad blood’ was mentioned in connection with certain incidents concerning my early life. My aunt, when told of his diatribe, wept. My uncle, after testily bidding me to be more careful where I trod, advised me to accept Frick’s recommendation that I seek employment in the gold mines of South Africa. Mercifully my aunt intervened.

‘Mr Vanderbilt’s suite,’ continued the steward, ‘has been taken over by a gentleman who was to have travelled second class. It’s rumoured he comes from Manchester.’

‘That’s in the north,’ I said, as though I wasn’t sure.

‘Indeed it is, sir, and a very prosperous city. The gentleman in question is in the clothing business.’ Here the steward tried to relieve me of my overcoat. I shook him off; the picture frame was still tucked against my ribs.

‘May I say, sir,’ he blabbered on, ‘how sorry we are not to have the pleasure of your uncle’s company this trip. Business commitments, I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Mr Morgan,’ I said, ‘is a glutton for work,’ and feared I sounded too dry. My uncle, possibly at that moment, was strolling the beach at Aix-les-Bains in the company of his mistress. ‘Mr Frick,’ I added, ‘is equally burdened.’

‘As I understand it, sir,’ the steward replied, ‘his is in the nature of a domestic dilemma. His lady wife has broken her ankle.’

Presently he left me. I took the painting from my coat and propped it on the dressing table. The girl’s eyes were less searching than when gazing from the wall of the corridor at Princes Gate. Nor did she seem as pretty, her nose a shade too tilted, her jaw-line a little too heavy. I looked for a likeness in my own face in the glass, and found none.

The steward returned with bath-towels. He said two young ladies had arrived to take up the adjoining stateroom. ‘Daughter of a baronet.’ he confided, ‘travelling with a companion. Both on the excitable side.’

I laid the painting on the bed and went in search of Melchett.

It was some minutes to noon when I made my way up the ship by means of the Grand Staircase. Judging by the number of people hurrying downwards, departure was imminent. I was nearly knocked off my feet by Mr Ismay who fairly ran past trailing three pale children. Behind, wearing the melancholy expression habitual to men assured of the fulfilment of cherished hopes, loped Thomas Andrews, managing director and chief designer of the White Star Line.

Although Andrews didn’t stop, he hailed me by name, followed by the flung observation that it was good to see me and we should talk later. Immensely hard working and reserved to a fault, he had more than once paused beside my desk on one of his fleeting visits to the draughtsmen’s shed at Queen’s Island. The work I’d been put to was hardly worthy of comment, let alone praise – my uncle had a regrettable belief in the harmful effects of nepotism and I was engaged in specifications concerning wash-basins in the third class accommodation areas – but Andrews had never failed to convey appreciation. It was only to be expected, of course, that he should take a special interest in my progress, seeing I was nephew to the owner of the shipping line, yet I fancied he liked me for my own sake.

Gratified at the encounter I came out on A deck and by dint of persistence managed to secure a position at the rail some yards below the bridge. I was wedged between two ladies, one wielding a parasol, the other laughing.

There was now but one gangway remaining, at the foot of which the master-at-arms was preventing a dozen or more working men from boarding. I guess they had dallied too long in the nearest public house and arrived too late to sign on. One of them flung his kit upwards, and, attempting to duck under the officer’s arm, was sent staggering from a shove to the chest.

‘Shame,’ murmured the woman with the parasol, and then she too began to laugh.

From where I stood I could see Captain Smith talking with the quartermaster on the deck above. I liked Smith, though I wasn’t sure I got his measure. I was sixteen when I first met him, the time my aunt had taken me to Europe on the SS
Adriatic
, then under his command. He’d owned a drooling dog which I took to exercising each day, throwing it ginger biscuits on the promenade deck. Being young and in need of sensation I often hoped the biscuit would skitter overboard and the dog leap to follow, though had it done so I expect I would have howled with the best of them. Smith came up one morning and caught me at play. He said nothing but I know he rumbled me because that night at dinner he hooked the dog’s lead over my chair. On the same voyage six of the crew were caught looting the first class baggage hold. My aunt reported a lost vanity case which had belonged to her mother. Everyone said how ugly such behaviour was and how an abuse of trust harmed the perpetrator almost as much as the victim. My aunt held that the rich, having a heightened sense of property, were bound to feel such betrayals more keenly than the poor. Later she discovered she’d left the case at home.

As I watched, the quartermaster put up his hand to grasp the lanyard. A unified wail of anticipation rose from the quayside, to be drowned in the ship’s awesome boom of farewell as steam gushed from the giant whistles half-way up the forward funnels. They blasted twice more, scattering the seabirds wheeling through the black smoke billowing from the tugs now straining to drag the
Titanic
from dock to river. A weak sun came out and the paintwork glittered.

The hysterical woman on my left expressed disappointment at the lack of ceremony, there being neither bands to serenade our leaving nor the customary salutes from vessels berthed nearby. ‘I expected more of a show,’ she complained.

For myself, I was past caring one way or the other, being in that disembodied state of mind induced by a sleepless night and a double brandy. As the ship slid away and the town, nudged by its purple forest, slipped along the horizon, I drifted somewhere above the giddy circling of the smoke-wreathed gulls.

I remember the woman with the parasol asking if it wasn’t grand to see the look of gratitude on the castaway’s face – she identified him as a stoker – now that his kit-bag had been flung down to him on the dock, and I said yes, yes, pretty darn grand, although I was no longer looking at the quay but one deck below to where the man with the split lip stood beside the woman who had been his companion in the hotel. She was clearly agitated, leaning at a dangerous angle over the rail and gesticulating wildly. A breeze blew up, threatening the stability of her hat, and he took her by the elbows and forced her round to face him. He actually shook her, at which she crumpled. Awkwardly, for she was at least six inches the taller, she hid her face in his shoulder. He spoke to her then and in spite of the hullabaloo all around I had the curious notion I heard what he said. ‘
All is not lost. There is always another way
.’

I came to myself then, and some moments later Charlie Melchett clapped me on the back, full of apologies for the mishap of the night before.

‘I did look for you,’ he shouted. ‘I sent the car round to Princes Gate at four o’clock this morning.’

‘My fault,’ I bellowed. ‘Don’t give it a thought.’

‘They said they hadn’t seen you for two days. Where the devil have you been staying?’

‘I told you the whole story last night,’ I said.

‘You went through the revolving doors like a dervish, but when Hopper—’ He broke off and tugged at my arm. ‘Look, there’s my mother. She’s seen us.’

I waved dutifully at the onlookers side-stepping to keep pace with us, though it was impossible to distinguish one face among so many. I was genuinely fond of kind Lady Melchett – but then, almost all mothers I have known have been kind to me. Besides, we had now reached that point where the dock waters met the upper reaches of the sea and the ship was beginning a ninety-degree turn to port. A tremor was felt on deck as the propellers churned to combat the incoming tide.

The nearby docks were full of ships, including the
Olympic
, laid up on account of the recently ended miners’ strike. It was the strike and the uncertainty of a sailing date that had caused the cancellations. My aunt had cabled that I should make it to France and transfer to the
Mauretania
, but as my baggage had already gone on ahead and I hadn’t wanted to miss the fun of travelling with Melchett and Van Hopper I’d stuck to my plans. More to the point, I knew Thomas Andrews would be aboard.

The
Olympic
was berthed in the Test Docks alongside the SS
New York
, whose stern we were now approaching. A man in a bowler hat ran back and forth across her poop deck waving his arms windmill fashion. As we drew level both ships rocked under our swell; I clearly saw the tethering ropes slacken, then grow taut.

‘Promise to shoot me,’ shouted Melchett, ‘if you ever catch me sporting a bowler at sea.’

Some people heard what they thought were revolver shots when the
New York
broke her moorings. The man on the poop leapt in shock as her hawsers whipped the air. Hissing, the crowd surged backwards. Hopper later swore he’d seen a woman lashed round the waist and spun like a top across the quay, but I doubt it; she would surely have been cut in two. Drawn by the
Titanic
’s displacement of water, the
New York
began to swing towards our bows.

I don’t think the womenfolk on either side of me were conscious of the danger, indeed, judging from their redoubled squeals and the abandoned manner in which the parasol swirled about my head, the incident appeared merely to provide that missing element of showmanship.

The tugs having got lines on her, the
New York
was nosed out of our way. All the same, it took an hour or more, at the end of which the
Titanic
’s bugler, sounding a delayed serving of the midday meal, rose from deck to deck blowing ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. Melchett and I, neither of us being hungry, went on a tour of the ship.

An hour later we had got no further than the smoke-room. As Melchett drolly remarked, we had plenty of time and the ship was unlikely to go anywhere without us. That geek Ginsberg was there; fortunately he was engaged in conversation with one of the Taft cousins and kept his distance. Quite suddenly I felt immensely cheerful, and it had nothing to do with the lager beer we were drinking. The feeling took me by surprise as up until then I hadn’t known I was miserable. One moment it had been the hardest thing in the world to attempt the faintest of smiles, and the next there was this almighty rush of well-being that had me grinning inanely. I expect it had much to do with being in Melchett’s company. I didn’t know him as intimately as I knew Hopper, which meant there was none of that carelessness bordering on contempt usual between friends of long standing. All at once, it struck me he was the sort of fellow one could confide in.

He was enthusing over the magnificence of the ship, comparing it in concept and visionary grandeur to the great cathedrals of Chartres and Notre Dame. ‘A cathedral,’ he reiterated, waving his cheroot in the direction of the stained glass above the bar, ‘constructed of steel and capable of carrying a congregation of three thousand souls across the Atlantic.’

‘I took a picture from my uncle’s house,’ I said. ‘That’s why you couldn’t find me this morning.’

‘Just think of it,’ he crowed. ‘All this mass and speed and yet she moves so gracefully she doesn’t even tilt the drink in one’s glass.’ He thumped the arm of his chair at the wonder of it.

‘I moved into a hotel because I stole a picture, Charlie,’ I said, and immediately regretted the correction.

For a moment I thought he hadn’t heard me. He sat there, one side of his blond head darkened by the ruby glow of the mahogany wall, eyes bright with pleasure. ‘What picture?’ he asked.

‘Of my mother. Painted before I was born.’

‘It wasn’t a painting,’ he said. ‘Just a photograph. You insisted on passing it round after we caught up with Van Hopper at my club. You spun a yarn about it having been given you by some poor chap who ended up dead in a barber’s chair. We couldn’t get any sense out of you.’

‘There
was
a dead man—’

‘And it couldn’t have been your mother . . . not unless she was Japanese.’

At that, I felt more cheerful than ever, for while I’d eased my conscience I’d miraculously avoided censure. All the same, there was a corner of me that wished he had listened.

Shortly after, Melchett ordered champagne to toast the start of our voyage. ‘To being alive,’ he said, thrusting his glass towards the ceiling. ‘To being young, to being lucky enough to be here at such a time.’ Following this outburst of sentiment, he grew pink; he was, after all, British.

I own I felt protective of him; he was such a boy. I’d never had a brother, any more than I’d known a mother or a father. Women can nurture anything small enough, including animals, but I reckon men need someone of their own sex to arouse an instinct free of possessiveness. Charlie was nineteen years old and I twenty-two, and those three years might have been thirty if a gap in innocence could be measured.