Forget-Me-Not Child. Anne Bennett
Читать онлайн книгу.
sympathy – and it ended up with Mary and Angela helping the very drunk Matt up the stairs to bed. As they lowered him on to the bed, Angela said, ‘Are you going to undress him?’
‘I am not,’ Mary said emphatically. ‘I’m not even trying to move his hulk around to get him more comfortable. I’ll just remove his shoes, that’s all, and I’ll tell you, I’d not have his head in the morning for a pension, and yet I can envy him because for the last few hours he has been able to stop worrying about those lads.’
‘They’ll be all right,’ Angela said. ‘They probably had a fright and might have got a bit wet, but they are big strapping lads and know how to look after themselves.’
‘Of course they do and you are right,’ Mary said and Angela so hoped she was right as she followed Mary down the stairs.
On 18th April just before eight in the evening, Finbarr and Colm had stood just outside the harbour in New York and watched the Carpathian sail in. And once the Carpathian had docked, the two young men surged through with the rest to check the list of survivors to see if their younger brothers had been among the lucky ones. A sailor from the rescue ship, seeing their anxious scrutiny of the lists pinned up, asked who they were searching for, and when they told him he said that few men had got off. ‘I heard as how there weren’t even enough lifeboats for everyone.’
‘Not enough lifeboats?’ Finbarr repeated almost in disbelief.
‘Well wasn’t it supposed to be unsinkable?’
Finbarr nodded. ‘That’s what they claimed wasn’t it, Colm?’
‘Yes,’ said Colm in agreement. ‘I mean, that was one reason we encouraged them to travel on the Titanic.’
‘Well it hit a gigantic iceberg, see. Most of an iceberg is below the water, you only see a bit of it, and whatever way it happened, it hit the iceberg and started to sink. I heard this from the sailors we pulled onto our ship,’ the Carpathian sailor said. ‘One of them said when the iceberg was spotted there wasn’t time to turn such a large ship to avoid it. He said if they hadn’t tried to avoid it and had hit it head on it probably would have been all right but, as it was, it crashed into the side and the iceberg ripped straight through it and it started to fill with water.’
‘What were you doing picking up sailors when more passengers could have been in the lifeboats?’ Finn asked.
‘They were the sailors chosen to row the lifeboats,’ the Carpathian sailor said. ‘If they hadn’t rowed away from the ship as quick as possible when it sank it would have pulled the lifeboats down with it. Then we’d have had no survivors at all to rescue. There were a few other men as well. Travelling first class, some were let on the boats straight away, but then the crew found out how dire the situation was and after that it was women and children only that were loaded into the lifeboats.’
‘And the rest of the men?’ Finbarr asked, though he knew the answer.
‘They went down with the ship,’ the sailor said bluntly. And then, looking at the clothes Finbarr and Colm had on, which marked them as working men, the sailor went on, ‘Would your brothers be travelling steerage?’
‘They were,’ Finbarr said. ‘What of it?’
‘Nothing,’ the sailor said. ‘That is, nothing good. It’s just that these sailors told us that few steerage passengers, carried in the bowels of the ship, made it to the lifeboats anyway, not even the women and children. One told me some hadn’t even got to the deck when the ship sank without trace.’
‘People wouldn’t have been picked up by other ships, would they?’ Colm cried, desperate to find some glimmer of hope. ‘Like if they were clinging to some wreckage or something like that to keep afloat?’
The sailor shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate. First off, there were no other ships in the area. Ours was the only one who answered the distress call, so probably any other ships were too far away to be of any use. And secondly, even if someone had managed to hang on to wreckage, how long do you think they’d last in water cold enough to have huge icebergs floating in it? One minute? Maybe two, but no more than that before they froze to death.’
Colm staggered at the news. They bought papers on their way home and read the reports of the collision that sank a ship claimed to be unsinkable on her maiden voyage. It was news that shocked the world, and their brothers had died, and the way they died was horrendous, and Finbarr in particular felt as guilty as Hell for urging Sean and Gerry to follow them.
When they returned to their lodgings they decided to say nothing to their mother and father about the things the sailor from the rescue ship told them. ‘It would serve no purpose and only upset them further,’ Finn said. ‘Anyway, it’s not the thing to put in a telegram, and that’s what we must send first thing tomorrow and we can write them a fuller letter later.’
Colm agreed, ‘Aye and it will be hard enough to cope with the loss of two sons and enough to be going on with.’
And so the bare telegram just said that neither Sean nor Gerry were among the survivors on the Carpathian. They had been waiting for the telegram and yet Angela’s fingers shook as she took it from the telegraph boy. ‘Any message?’ the boy asked.
Angela shook her head. ‘No message.’
She shut the door and turned and gave the telegram to Barry, for she couldn’t bring herself to open it. Barry took it from her and read the few bald words out to them all as his own voice was breaking with emotion, and tears sprang from his eyes as he felt the aching loss of his brothers. Angela did too, but she pushed aside her heartache to deal with Matt and Mary who were in pieces.
She knew that until the arrival of the telegram Matt and Mary would have hoped it wasn’t as bad as they feared. They had encouraged this. They had all hoped themselves because it’s what people did. But now all hope was snuffed out, Sean and Gerry were gone and she would never see them again, and if she felt the pain of that loss so keenly, she could only imagine what it was doing to Matt and Mary, and the anguish etched in both their faces tore at her heart.
Even after the telegram Barry and Angela couldn’t understand the scale of this tragedy and in the papers Barry had brought in they had both read about the proverbial unsinkable liner, on its maiden voyage, that had indeed sunk and sunk so quickly when it struck an iceberg that though 705 had managed to get into lifeboats and so were saved, 1,517 perished. Most of the fatalities, the papers claimed, were steerage or third-class passengers and any that were rescued were women and children. The lack of enough lifeboats for all the passengers was also discussed, and the fact that a lot of the lifeboats were not full when they pulled away from the ship, for the Titanic sank quicker than anyone thought it would.
The newspapers made grim reading and Angela hid the papers away in the cellar with the kindling for the fire, intending to burn them when she got the chance, for she and Barry both thought dealing with the death of their sons was quite enough to be going on with, without constantly reading about such a disaster. But that was hard to do without Matt or Mary catching sight of the headlines and so on, because they seldom left the sitting room.
Coming into the room the evening following the arrival of the telegram, Mary had sobbed afresh as Angela helped get her ready for bed. Angela said, ‘I understand Mammy’s distress really because I suppose the telegram snuffed out the last glimmer of hope that she kept burning in her heart. I know it did for me, for I loved them just as if they had been my true brothers.’
‘Yes,’ said Barry with a sigh. ‘I know you did and they knew it too. And I know the casualty figures are shocking, but knowing that two of those left to die are your own flesh and blood is hard to take. But that is what happened, and they are dead and gone, so that neither of us will see them again. But that’s how it is and we must deal with it.’
Everyone felt sorry for the McCluskys and many understood the spiral of depression Matt and Mary had sunk into when the telegram arrived, cutting off all hope that either of their sons might have survived. So they continued to pop in and out