Every Man for Himself Read online

  For perhaps five seconds the three of us remained fixated, he looking at her, she looking at him, myself regarding first one then the other. He was hatless and a bead of sweat rolled from beneath the black curls lolling on his brow. Then the fourth spectator, leaning even further backward in his seat, called out, ‘My word, life is a tragedy, what?’ It was such a knowing, insolent intrusion that I coloured up.

  Minutes later he too quit the room. This time I made out I was studying the breakfast menu. As he passed he gave a little bark of a cough, doubtless to draw my attention. I didn’t look up; in my present state of lethargy I feared I might disappoint him. Though not vain, I’m aware my outward appearance raises expectations.

  When he’d gone I remained for an hour or more in the empty dining room, during which time the third class train from Waterloo puffed up the tracks of West Road and disgorged its steerage passengers alongside White Star Dock. I took little interest in the massive liner that was soon to carry me home, though in her beauty she was as deserving of attention as the tall woman who had recently left the hotel. More so, for in a small way, albeit very small, I’d helped in her creation. That being said, my thoughts were mostly of my mother who had never been closer to my heart.

  Dreaming there, my mind racing the clouds above Southampton Water, I resolved, not for the first time, to spend the next few days pursuing fitness of mind and body; a visit to the swimming pool and squash court each morning, the library in the afternoon followed by two courses at dinner, absolutely no alcohol and retirement by ten o’clock at the latest. No sooner had I dwelt on the satisfaction to be gained from such a puritanical regime than I was compelled to order a brandy. I wasn’t irresolute by nature, merely shaken at the prospect.

  I saw the man with the split lip again when I was searching for Melchett’s automobile. He was talking to J.S. Seefax, a second cousin of my aunt’s and a crashing bore, always rambling on about his early manhood in Georgia when as an agent for the Confederate Government he’d helped run the blockade of Europe. I fancy he saw me too, for they both turned in my direction, but at that moment, the first class passenger train having just drawn in, I glimpsed Van Hopper on the platform. He was with two other fellows, one of whom I knew slightly and didn’t much care for. The previous month, at a party given by Laura Rothschild, knowing I was related to J. Pierpont Morgan – for whom I’m named – he’d traded on a dubious connection within minutes of our being introduced. ‘My grandmother,’ he had boasted, ‘was a great friend of Mr Morgan’s. In her girlhood, of course.’ He had the audacity to wink. I’m not above snobbishness – my own beginnings were lamentable enough – but I detest crawlers, or rather I despise a too evident regard for birth and position.

  Later we’d crossed swords at a picnic beside the Thames on the occasion of the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. When the first boat sank he let out a roar of delight, and upon the second taking on water he ran up and down the bank, crowing and flinging his boater into the air. I told him to keep quiet but he wouldn’t, at which I challenged him to put his fists up, only to have him flopping down in the grass and waving his legs about like a beetle. I guess he was drunk.

  Van Hopper said I looked pretty well done in, though he himself was unshaven and his boots in need of a blacking brush. He demanded to know what had happened to me the night before; apparently he and Melchett had spent a good three hours waiting for me to show up at the Café Royal.

  I was fond of Hopper, though distrustful. However close, one should always be wary of those with a different perspective on the past. My sense of injustice is . . . was . . . sharper than his and I believe in retribution. Nor do I mistake the limits of my own horizons for those of the world. Van Hopper’s round eyes and pink cheeks give him away; he has . . . had . . . the face of a child.

  ‘I was there,’ I told him.

  ‘The head waiter thought he saw you, or someone very like. You were clutching a bunch of dead pansies and warbling the chorus from The Barber of Seville.’ He turned to his beetle friend smirking at his shoulder. ‘I believe you’ve met Archie Ginsberg.’

  ‘It can’t have been me,’ I protested. ‘I was in no mood for singing.’

  Hopper’s people and mine were connected by marriage, and equally disconnected in that all our lives our respective father figures had preferred to spend time with women other than their wives. It was worse for Hopper, of course, seeing I had no mother who could be betrayed. It’s only recently that my uncle has discovered a sense of family unity – old age is remarkable for its lurch towards sentimentality – and in childhood Hopper and I had spent most part of every summer at the house of his maternal grandmother in Maine. When I see Hopper in my head, it is with knees drawn up to his chest, swinging out on the weeping branches of the dusty willow that grew in the shallows of the lake at Warm Springs.

  Grown, we’d roomed together at Harvard and I had hoped he and Sissy might make a go of it, although he was too much the loafer and she a sight too serious-minded for it to come to anything. She’s only a girl, yet her intelligence is formidable. They’d spent a lot of time battling it out on the tennis court, often in moonlight, but she was never enamoured enough to let him win. In my view her husband Whitney is more of a slouch than Hopper. Against that, I have to take Sissy’s word for it he has the sort of eyelashes to set a girl’s heart pounding.

  If Van Hopper had been unaccompanied I would willingly have stayed at his side; as it was, I took advantage of the crush on the platform to slip away and board on my own. Several times I was greeted by people I knew, lastly by the Carters of Philadelphia who stood at the foot of the first class gangway supporting a swaying J.S. Seefax at either elbow.

  ‘Morgan,’ Mrs Carter called out when she saw me, waving her free hand imploringly.

  ‘What fun,’ I cried back, and clambered upwards, damned if I was going to be saddled with helping the old dodderer to his stateroom.

  As it happened, I wouldn’t have been able to, not without map and compass. I had worked as an apprentice draughtsman in the design offices of Harland and Wolff for eleven months prior to the launch of the ship, but only on a section of E deck aft, and she had eight decks, each in excess of eight hundred feet in length. Unfamiliar as I was with the general layout of the huge vessel, it was with considerable difficulty and after many wrong turnings that I found my berth. Entering amidships on B deck and foolishly avoiding the Grand Staircase, I was confronted with such bewildering stretches of passageways and companionways, each thronged with a confusion of people, that I got into the wrong elevator and was first transported, packed like a sardine, down to the racquets courts on G deck, and then swept too far up and spilled out, starboard side, into the gymnasium on the boat deck. Here, a singular sight awaited, that of the stout man who had earlier breakfasted in the South Western Hotel, still clutching that oblong box and with hat now jammed over his eyes, seated astride a mechanical camel. I learned later he’d been persuaded into this undignified pose by a photographer from the Illustrated London News.

  When I eventually reached my accommodation on C deck it was a relief to find my luggage not only installed but in the process of being unpacked by a steward who had sensibly made enquiries as to my status. The resulting information rendered him suitably deferential, yet not sufficiently so as to arouse contempt; I like people to know their place, just as long as I’m not required to step on them. He said his name was McKinlay and in common with his kind he was more than eager to discuss my fellow passengers. As a proud native of some Scottish village with an unpronounceable name, rather than a product of the huddled masses of my adopted country, his approach was almost subtle. On my complaining that I’d had the devil of a job getting to my cabin, he expressed astonishment and promised to mention it to the chief steward.

  ‘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 aboar
d. 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.’