Listen to the Moon

  Brendan grabbed me, held me and would not let go. “I’ll fetch her for you, Merry.”

  “You promise?” I cried.

  “I promise. I’ll bring her to you. Now, girl, you’re to stay right here by this lifeboat, and wait for me. You’re not to move, d’you hear? I’ll be back with your mother in just a jiffy, don’t you worry. We’ll get you both into a lifeboat. There’s plenty of them, and we’re in sight of land, we’ll all be just fine.” Then he was gone.

  I did as Brendan had told me, and waited, and waited, the ship going down fast all the while. There was chaos and terror all around me, as the crew tried to lower the lifeboats. But the ship was already listing at such an angle that many of the lifeboats filled with people were left dangling above the sea and unable to be lowered any further. They tilted violently, at every lurch of the ship, throwing passengers screaming into the water. Some of the boats were lowered in, not level at all, but stern or bow first, plunging into the sea, filling at once and sinking immediately. There were hundreds already struggling in the ocean. Many could not swim and were drowning before my eyes. I had to turn away. I could not bear to see any more. But I could not turn away from the screaming, from the wailing of the small children desperate for lost mothers and fathers.

  I recognised then one of the older passengers, a kindly-looking old lady, not unlike Aunty Ducka back home, who’d sat always on her own in the dining room, and whom I had admired both for her serenity and for the dark green velvet dress she always wore. She had smiled at me that first lunchtime when I came in, when so many others had simply stared. I was grateful to her for that, and remembered her now. She sat on a bench, her eyes closed, her lips moving in prayer, her fingers touching the cross she wore around her neck. She opened her eyes then and saw me watching her. She smiled at me, as she had before, and beckoned me over to sit beside her. She did not speak a word, but put her arm round me and held my hand in hers.

  There came then a great groan from the depths of the ship, and an explosion of steam like a last breath. Every time the ship lurched and listed again, the old lady held me ever tighter. Then she spoke. “You’re young,” she said. “You should get in a lifeboat, child, you should save yourself.”

  “I have to wait for my mama,” I told her.

  She looked at me long and hard. “If I was your mother, I should not want you to wait for me. I should want you to save yourself. Come along, dear.” We stood up then, and with great difficulty, clinging to anything or anyone to save ourselves from falling, made our way through the crowd to the ship’s rail, to the nearest lifeboat, which swung there, already overfull. The old lady spoke to a ship’s officer who seemed to be in charge. “I want you to take my grandchild,” she said. At first he paid her no attention, but she would not be denied. She tapped him repeatedly on the shoulder, till he turned round and had to listen.

  “My grandchild must get in that boat,” she insisted.

  “Sorry. No room, Ma’am.”

  “You have a child at home?” asked the lady.

  “Yes, Ma’am.”

  “If this was your child, would you find room for her?”

  The officer stared at her, speechless for a moment.

  “Then take my grandchild,” she said.

  He didn’t argue any more. He held out his hand to help me in. The last thing she said to me was: “Live, child, you have to live. Live for your mother, live for me.” The lifeboat swayed suddenly away from me as I tried to step across into it. I am not sure in the end whether I leapt in or whether the officer tossed me in, but one way or another I ended up in the bottom of the boat. As the boat was lowered away, I looked everywhere above me for the old lady, or for Brendan, or Mama. There was no face I knew.

  There was no face I knew in the boat either. Strange hands were lifting me, helping me to find a place to sit in the boat, which was packed tight from bow to stern. With every sudden lurching of the lifeboat as it was lowered down towards the sea, my heart lurched with it. I cried for Mama, searching for her again and again among the faces of the passengers who crowded the ship’s rail, looking down at us, a few waving, most crying, but she was not there. She was not there.

  All I could think, as the lifeboat struck the water violently, bounced and settled, as the sailors rowed us away, was that I should have gone looking for her myself, that I should never have trusted Brendan, that I should never have got in that lifeboat without her. I was crying bitter tears of self-recrimination when I felt a small cold hand come into mine. Celia was there beside me, clutching her teddy bear, and sobbing pitifully.

  “Where’s Paul?” I cried. “Where’s your mother, and your father?”

  She shook her head. I looked all around the lifeboat, and back up at the ship, at those faces looking down at us. They were nowhere to be seen. I gathered Celia to me and held her close. She was crying and shaking, but calmer now. She clung to me tightly, burying her head in my shoulder. “We’ll be all right, Celia,” I told her. “We’re not far from land, I know we’re not. They’ll find us. I’ll look after you now. Promise.”

  I never imagined a ship of that size could go down so quickly. She was gone in minutes. But she did not go down completely. Brendan’s beautiful gentle giant was dying. Her stern stayed there above the surface, refusing to sink, the ship’s rail where Brendan and I had stood only moments before, it seemed, still clearly visible.

  All around our lifeboat now, in every direction, the sea was dotted with other boats like ours, all distancing themselves as fast as they could from the wreck of the great ship. Many were upturned, with passengers clinging on wherever they could. And everywhere there were people in the sea, struggling to swim towards the lifeboats, or clinging on to them, begging to be helped on board. There were deckchairs floating in the sea, benches, tables, suitcases and trunks. The ocean was littered with wreckage as far as the eye could see, and in amongst it were hundreds of people, swimming for their lives, many of them losing their lives as I watched.

  Already we must have had a dozen or more hanging on to the sides of our boat, clamouring and pleading to be helped aboard. I can hear their voices now, I can see their faces.

  “For God’s sake, don’t leave me here.”

  “I don’t want to die.”

  “Dear God, save me!”

  One young woman grasped at my hand, then slipped away, too weak to cling on any longer. “TellMomgoodbye,” she cried, and disappeared under the water before my eyes. Others clung on where they could, begging us to save them. The sailor on the tiller was shouting at them again and again, telling them to go away, that there were other boats nearby, several only half full, that they weren’t far away, that they should swim there, that we would be in danger of sinking if we took on any more. He forbade us absolutely from helping anyone else on board. But despite his orders, and ignoring his curses, when mothers or children swam up to the lifeboat, no one could turn them away. There were some still strong enough, and desperate to live, who managed to haul themselves up into the boat anyway without anyone’s help. No one had the heart to prevent them.

  Everyone could see the lifeboat was dangerously low in the sea by now, that the water was already washing in over the sides in places, lapping around our feet, deeper all the time. The sailor on the tiller was raging at us. “For Christ’s sake, what’s the matter with you people? We’ll sink if we let anyone else on. D’you see those bodies in the sea? You see them? D’you want to be like them? No one else gets on this lifeboat, you hear me? No one!” But nothing he said made any difference.

  The lifeboat was by now completely surrounded. There were hands clinging, it seemed, to every inch of her sides. Faces, white with fear, were peering in on us, mouthing last appeals for help, last curses, eyes pleading, accusing. The sailor kept trying to tell them. “Can’t you understand?” he cried. “You’ll sink the boat! You’re sinking the boat. You’ll drown the lot of us.”

  One of those still clinging on, and so close to me that I could have reach
ed out and touched him, was an old man. He had not begged to be helped in. He had not said a word, but hung there in silence, shivering, gazing up at me, at Celia. I did not know what to say. I could hardly bear to look at him. Then he spoke: “He’s right. We will sink the boat. You are young. I am not. Live, live long and be happy. Bless you.” And with that he simply let go and swam away. It was the last I saw of him.

  Celia clung to me, ever more desperate now for warmth and comfort, whimpering and crying for her mother. I clung to her, trying to reassure her, and, in doing so, to reassure myself all I could. “Look, Celia, d’you see? There are lots of lifeboats everywhere. Your mama will be in one of them, your papa too, and Paul. We’ll be fine, we’ll all be fine. I’ll look after you, and you look after Teddy. Right?”

  I talked to her on and on like that. I don’t know if it was any comfort to her, but it seemed to work, for a while at least, to take her mind and mine away from everything that had happened, from the dying that was going on all around us, from the horror of all we were witnessing. The ocean itself seemed to be writhing and moaning in despair, crying out in fear, wailing in pity. As the hours passed and the cold took hold of us, I could see that there were fewer and fewer people swimming in the sea, fewer clinging on to the lifeboats, more bodies floating face down in the water. Lifeboats and wreckage and debris were scattered far and wide. We were more and more alone on the open sea.

  I heard now only murmured prayers and the occasional sound of a voice. One voice I remember particularly, came from far away across the water, but was quite clear. It was a man’s voice.

  “Tell her. Tell my mother. Mrs Bailey. Twenty-two Phillimore Gardens, London. Tell her that her son, Harry, died thinking of her. Tell her, please. God save us all.” Then silence.

  As time passed, I tried to force myself not to look at the bodies in the water any more, fearing if I did that one of them might be Mama. I knew that if she was in the water she must be drowned by now, and I didn’t want to see her. I could not help myself though. I looked. I had to look. How I wish I never had.

  I saw her, only because I saw her peacock dressing gown, the colours bright as jewels on the grey of the ocean, peacock blue and gold, the feathers all the colours of the rainbow. She was floating away from me, further and further away, face down in the ocean. There could be no mistake. It was her Chinese dressing gown, the strutting peacock on the back, feathers displayed, the dressing gown she loved, the dressing gown she always wore, that she was wearing in bed the last time I had seen her that morning.

  It was her. It was Mama. I felt a strange numbness coming over me. It was as if she had taken the heart and soul of me away with her when she died, and left me with just the shell of myself, an empty shell. There were no tears inside me to shed.

  We were all lost.

  IT IS DIFFICULT TO REMEMBER quite how long we had been in the lifeboat before Celia stopped shivering. At some point I realised she was still in my arms. I thought perhaps she had fallen asleep, or that she might even be dead from the cold. But she was still clutching her teddy bear, still clinging to me. I could feel her breath against my cheek. There was life in her. I talked to her, when I remembered to, tried to shake her awake. To slip into sleep would be to die, and never wake up again. She must not sleep. I must not sleep. When she opened her eyes, I could see she did not know who I was any more. She was calling me Mama, and slipping in and out of consciousness. I hugged her tightly to me, trying to lend her some of the heat that was left in me. I blew on her hands and cheeks, kept talking to her, but she was holding on to me so weakly now, only barely clinging on to life.

  Despite my best efforts, I too was drifting in and out of sleep. I remember being roused by some kind of a kerfuffle on the other side of the lifeboat somewhere behind me, by the sound of cursing and splashing. I felt the boat rocking violently and looked around me to find out what was going on. The sailor at the rudder was doing all he could to repel a couple of men who were trying to haul themselves up out of the sea into the lifeboat, when he himself was grabbed by the arm and pulled overboard into the water. I saw him surface once and drift away. He was trying to swim, but he couldn’t. He could only flail about. The sea stifled his cries and he went down. Then, as the men scrambled to climb on, the boat tipped, and the water rushed in and was all around our feet, and quickly up to our knees.

  We all knew the boat was going down, that there was nothing we could do about it. As the seawater rose and rose about us, I was trying to shake Celia awake. Just in time she woke enough to do what I was telling her to do, to climb on to my back and hold on. The boat was gone. We were in the sea. The cold of the water took me and chilled me to the bone at once. I swam away as fast as I could from all the screaming and cursing around me, swam clear of all those arms trying to grab me, away from all those piteous cries, begging for help from God, from anyone, help that I knew neither God nor I could give.

  I still do not know or understand why we try to cling on to life when there is no hope left. I was swimming out into an empty ocean, empty of all but debris, the leftovers of a wrecked ship, of wrecked lives, the waves choking me, the cold sapping the last of my strength, and with a semi-conscious child trying to hang on round my neck and slipping from me, I felt, with every stroke I took. There was no boat to swim towards, no land in sight, no reason to go on swimming.

  I did hold in my head the thought that so long as I swam I would not drown. Above all I did not want to drown. The thought of drowning, of sinking down and down, horrified me, kept my arms moving, my legs swimming. Mama, I knew, I would never see again, but Papa was waiting for me in his hospital bed. I had to try to live to see him again. But any determination in me to survive was weakened all too soon, as my legs were seized by cold and cramp. Every stroke taken was a superhuman effort to keep my chin above water, to stay afloat. And with every stroke I was less and less sure it was worth it.

  I was doing nothing but treading water now, my arms working only to hold me up. But Celia was dragging me down. I thought then, and it is a thought so shameful that it stays with me to this day, that I might shake her off my shoulders, be free of her weight, that I could last much longer without her. I could feel her arms round my neck, looser and looser all the time. But she was moaning occasionally. She was still clinging on to her teddy bear. For some reason, I was determined that, as long as she was trying to save that little bear, then I would do all I could to save her.

  I remember I hummed to her then as I swam. It was as much for me as for her. If I could hear the sound of my voice, I was still alive. I hummed rather than sang, so that the water did not come into my mouth, hummed all the piano tunes I knew, my Mozart piece again and again, my ‘Andante Grazioso’, Papa’s piece. Sometimes I heard Celia humming too in my ear, or was it moaning? Whatever it was, it was a response and it gave me new strength, new hope as we drifted away, out into the empty ocean.

  I thought at first it might be an upturned lifeboat I could see. It looked big enough, but it was the wrong shape. Lifeboats were white, and this was not white. Then I thought it looked like a large table of some kind. As I swam closer, I could see it was certainly made from wood, a dark wood, a shiny, polished wood, but shaped not at all like a table. It was both curved and angular in shape, and was floating in the sea, murmuring strangely, singing almost, as if it was something that might have life and breath. A whale perhaps, but I could see already it was too flat to be a whale, too shiny. And whales didn’t have edges or curves, not like this. This was man-made, I realised now, and must surely have come off the ship.

  I was close enough to touch it, then to lean on it, and hang on long enough to gather the last of what little energy I had left. I hitched Celia up higher on to my shoulders, and hauled myself up out of the sea. I lay there flat on my front, exhausted, with the strength only to breathe. Celia was still on my back, still clinging.

  I lifted my head to look about me. And only then did I realise what it was that had saved us. It was the piano,
Maurice’s grand piano from the dining room of the ship, the piano I had played such a short time before. His piano had become our life raft. I don’t know if it was my imagination, but I thought I could almost feel and hear the strings of the piano still alive beneath me. I inched my way with the greatest care towards the centre of the piano, for the waves, gentle though they seemed, were lapping over the piano all around its edges, and I could see it would be all too easy to slide and slip, and then be swept away and back into the sea. Safer, I thought, once I had reached the middle, I sat up and gathered Celia to me. She was limp in my arms, but still had hold of her teddy bear firmly by the arm. Somehow, we had all saved one another, all three of us, and with the help of a grand piano.

  But after a few moments of relief, of exhilaration that we were saved, it came to me that our refuge was only temporary, nothing but an illusion of safety, that both of us were too cold and too weak to survive for long. Celia was by now hardly conscious of being in this world at all. We were utterly alone on a wide, wide ocean with no land in sight, and little prospect of any help either.

  It occurred to me then that should the waves get up only a little, and even if we could stay where we were, right in the middle of our piano-raft, in the safest place, we must quickly be overwhelmed by the waves and swept off into the sea. There would be nothing to hold on to, nothing to stop us from sliding off, nor to save us from drowning. The ocean was waiting for us, I thought, and would not have to wait long. I looked up. The sky was blue above us, the sea glassy all around us, and there was hardly a breeze on my face. All I had was hope, and precious little of that.

  There was nothing for it but to lie down, hold Celia close to me, and wait for rescue, or death. I realised well enough which was likely to come first. I knew I had above all to stay awake, that if I dozed off at all, if I slipped into unconsciousness, my hold on Celia would be loosened, that she, and then I, could find ourselves all too easily in the sea again. So to keep myself awake I talked – to myself, to Mama, to Papa, to Miss Winters, to Pippa, to Uncle Mac and Aunty Ducka. I talked to Brendan too, but most often to Celia, hoping each time for a response of some kind, any kind. But there was none. There was life in her though, for she still clutched her teddy bear to her, and would not let it go, just as I would not let go of her.