Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [30]
‘I believe you come from Liverpool,’ I began, with the notion of putting him at his ease, though indeed he hadn’t once addressed me as sir.
‘Yes, yes,’ he cried impatiently, and motioned me to sit. He himself remained standing, my handkerchief still crumpled in his hand.
‘That man,’ said he, ‘that old geezer you just seen . . . he’s done a nine hour shift and gone straight into a six-hour one.’
‘That seems excessive,’ I said.
‘It isn’t right,’ said he. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed.’ In his indignation he kicked at the pellets on the floor. I told him I’d gathered from the steward that the crew was at full muster, to which he replied that was so, but only if circumstances had been normal.
‘And aren’t they?’ I queried.
‘Not on your Nellie!’ he scoffed. ‘What’s more, they knew about it before they signed us on. They just didn’t bother to hire enough extra men to deal with it.’
‘To deal with what?’
‘The bloody fire,’ he said. ‘The bloody fire what’s blazing in Number 10 coal bunker.’
I thought of Queen’s Island and the hull of the Titanic rising up in the drydock of Harland and Wolff. Three million rivets, thrust into coke braziers before being beaten into the overlapping plates, had gone into its construction. She was double-bottomed, the space between big enough for a man to stand up in. Hour upon hour the hammering continued, the clamorous echoes screeching off the tin roofs of the draughtsmen’s huts. At the end of the day when the hooter blew and work stopped, the sudden shocking silence plummeted from the leaden skies.
‘It’s been blazing for days,’ said Riley. ‘At this rate old man Smith’s going to be shamed into asking for the City Fire Department to meet us when we dock.’
I stayed silent, staring at the picture on the wall; it wasn’t the same dog I’d fed ginger biscuits. Ginsberg, I thought, had been in the right of it, though quite how the ship had been granted a certificate of sea-worthiness defeated me. I knew about fires from Tuohy. Containment was easy if one kept hosing down the coal; it was the damage done to the so-called steel plates that mattered. They weren’t steel at all, just raw iron, and iron weakened under exposure to heat. A picture came into my head of that front room by the harbour, of the hole in the oilcloth, the plaster statue of the Virgin simpering on the mantelpiece. I trembled; it wasn’t so much the fire that bothered me, rather the realisation that Tuohy’s rantings had been more than fine talk.
‘I don’t think you should mention this matter further,’ I said. ‘I’m quite sure the chief engineer is qualified to deal with the situation. And we have the chief designer on board.’
‘What do they care?’ Riley burst out. ‘They won’t be doing a fifteen-hour shift in that hell-hole.’
‘Neither will you,’ I reprimanded, and stood up. Sulkily he opened the door. ‘You may keep the handkerchief,’ I said, and added, ‘I don’t expect you to believe it but I’ve not always lived like this. There was a time when we might have played in the same gutter.’ Walking away I was annoyed with myself for being so open with him.
I wasn’t ready to go to bed, my thoughts running too wild. Though it was twenty past one by the clock on the landing of the Grand Staircase the lights were still burning in the library. Thomas Andrews was there, alone, scribbling in his notebook, a glass of whisky at his elbow. Remembering our encounter earlier that evening I was all for slipping out again but he spotted me. He immediately brought up the matter of the leaking bath taps and suggested I examine them first thing in the morning and supervise their fixing. When I had done that he wanted me to join him on a thorough inspection of the ship. The experience would be beneficial. It was evident he still thought I was a member of the design team.
He had in mind various adjustments and alterations. The colouring of the private promenade’s pebble-dashing was a shade too dark; the appearance of the wicker chairs on the starboard side might be improved if stained green; there were too many screws in stateroom