Every Man for Himself - Beryl Bainbridge [60]
I was glad I wasn’t outdoors, for even in the comparative warmth of the bridge house I found myself shivering. The silence wrapped me like a cloak and it was only then that I realised the ship no longer moved. When I pressed my face to the window to look down at the sea there was nothing but darkness; when I tilted my head the blackness was fiery with stars.
Soon, the group inside, all but the quartermaster, came out and walked straight past me. I followed at a distance, unsure of my position, and then Andrews doubled back and told me to put on warm clothes and return to the bridge as soon as possible.
There were even more people in the foyer when I made my way down. It was an incongruous sight; the mixture of clothing, the dressing-gowns and bathing-robes worn with gloves and scarves and fur tippets, the women with their hair loose, the men with their naked throats and ankles the colour of lard. I didn’t recognise Lady Duff Gordon until I heard her voice. She had creamed her face for sleep and her eyebrows had disappeared. No one seemed particularly disturbed by what had happened. The laughter bubbled beneath the drifting cigar smoke.
I put my tweed jacket on over my evening clothes and then my Newmarket coat. I thought of wearing my cap – it matched the tweed – but when I tried it on in the mirror it made me look too young. I hadn’t the faintest notion what Andrews expected of me. As a precaution I stuffed an exercise book into my pocket along with several pencils, in case I was asked to patrol the decks and jot down details of steamer chairs snapped by the shower of ice. McKinlay met me in the passageway. He’d been off duty but now everyone was on call. Not that there was anything to worry about. We’d start engines any moment. I went back to the bridge and waited.
I couldn’t tell anything from their expressions when they returned. Ismay wasn’t with them. This time as they passed through the door Andrews indicated I should follow. I stood respectfully at a distance beside a notice board on which ice warnings were pinned like butterflies.
The talk was fairly technical. The water had risen approximately fourteen feet about the keel, forward. The watertight bulkhead between boiler rooms 6 and 5 extended only as high as E deck. The first five compartments were filling and the weight of the water had already begun to pull her down at the bow. When it sank lower the water from Number 6 boiler room would swamp Number 5 boiler room. This would drag the bow even lower and water would flood Number 4, Number 3, Number 2, and so on.
‘How long have we?’ asked Captain Smith.
Andrews snapped his fingers at me and I dug out my pencil and exercise book. I was dreadfully afraid it was I who would have to make the calculations, but it was just paper he wanted. Once only he glanced up at the clock above the door. It was two minutes to midnight.
‘An hour and a half,’ he said, at last. ‘Possibly two. Not much longer.’
SIX
Monday, 15th April
There is no way of knowing how one will react to danger until faced with it. Nor can we know what capacity we have for nobility and self-sacrifice unless something happens to rouse such conceits into activity. In the nature of things, simply because I had survived without lasting hurt, I remembered little of those other occasions on which I’d been in considerable peril, once half-way up Mount Solaro when I’d been foolish enough to climb on to a wall and lost my footing, the other when tumbling from the side of a boat negotiating the Suez canal. Besides, I had been a boy then and it had been my own lack of sense that had landed me in trouble. As I trailed Thomas Andrews to his suite I confess I fairly glowed with exhilaration and can only suppose I’d failed to grasp the full import of that exchange in the wheelhouse. Andrews hadn’t uttered a word to me since leaving the bridge; now, coming within