The Lifeboat: A Novel

by Charlotte Rogan

  Mrs. Grant looked around the boat and gave us all a chance to speak about whatever was on our minds. She set the tone by speaking first. She said it was her opinion that Mr. Hardie had misused his power and kept us from the other boat out of some personal animosity he had for the man named Blake. This might or might not have cost lives, since we had never explored the possibility of moving some of our people when we had the opportunity. Then she charged that with his lottery, Hardie had directly caused the loss of three lives and possibly more, but it was our opinion she was interested in, not her own. The Colonel rose to his full height and said that Mr. Hardie had indeed endangered all of us by failing to approach the third boat in the first days and that he had, through his own actions and lack of judgment, lost the confidence of those placed by God or fate in his charge: “It might be folly to approach the other boat in such heavy seas as we saw today, but we should have done so when we could.” The Colonel came off looking almost heroic because he spared a thought for “the poor souls we just saw, who no doubt would have benefited from our earlier involvement and aid.”

  Only Mr. Hoffman spoke in defense of Mr. Hardie, pointing out that we ourselves had lost only eight of our number. There were still thirty-one of us, and except for Mrs. Forester, who was to die almost unnoticed later that day, we were in relatively good health; and while there was disagreement about whether the boat we had just seen was Blake’s boat or the one skippered by the bearded man, its occupants were clearly sicker and more depleted than we. We knew that one of the boats had started off filled beyond capacity, so if that was the one we had just seen, it seemed the chances of dying in that boat were far higher than they were in our own. It was Mr. Hoffman’s staunch belief that this was due to Mr. Hardie’s superior ability to keep his charges alive. Mr. Nilsson sat quietly by and said not a word either for or against.

  Mr. Hardie growled that whichever boat we had just seen, there was now plenty of room in it. “If some of ye want to take yer chances with it, I am sure it can be arranged,” he said, but Mrs. Grant said that if any of us were to be transferred to the other boat, it should be Mr. Hardie himself. At this suggestion, Mr. Hardie’s face took on a twisted look, and I shrank against Mr. Preston in horror to think that a person could harbor in himself such opposing personalities. In any event, the boat was now nowhere in sight, so even if there were some practical way to transfer Mr. Hardie, the question was now moot.

  Lisette spoke up to tell a story that had been whispered about since the third day, when we had learned that Mr. Blake had thrown two people out of his boat. I had heard the story several times, and each time it contained new details that were either factual additions from valid observers or pure fabrications based on our increasingly active imaginations. Lisette ventured that Mr. Blake’s boat was riding strangely in the water because he was carrying something heavy in it, something stolen from the locked room on the Empress Alexandra.

  Greta, who was completely enthralled with Hannah and Mrs. Grant and who had developed an irrational dislike of Mr. Hardie, then suggested that Hardie and Blake were coconspirators and that Hardie was somehow helping Blake by keeping our boat away from his. “But what evidence do you have?” I cried before I was even aware that I had a desire to speak, but the Colonel interrupted to declare, “If the charge is false, Mr. Hardie will tell us so.” Mrs. Grant, who returned Greta’s affection, said, “Greta deserves to be heard just as much as anyone else.” Then she turned to Mr. Hardie and asked, “Do you have anything to say in your defense?”

  Hardie replied, “If Blake and I did steal something, something which would otherwise have sunk to the bottom of the ocean, where it would have remained buried in the muck for all eternity, I would say: What do ye know about doing without, ye who have always had everything? Poverty is a shipwreck! It’s very easy to live moral lives when all of yer baser needs are attended to. And if we didn’t steal anything, I would say only: I wish we had.”

  “You are not only charged with theft, whether it be the box you have concealed from us or something more substantial that is carried in the other boat,” said Mrs. Grant. “What do you say to keeping us away from it and reducing the possibility of our rescue?”

  “How has it reduced anything? I don’t expect ye to listen to Hoffman there, but the proof of his argument is floundering about out here just like we are.”

  When it came her turn to speak, Mary Ann shook her head to indicate that she had nothing to say, but she leaned toward me and whispered, “I can’t help thinking about what Mrs. Fleming said. About how your husband paid Mr. Hardie to take you on board. Maybe that’s what was in the box. Maybe he was given it by your husband and didn’t steal it at all. Did the box look at all familiar to you? Did you get a good look at it? Surely you should say something if you did!”

  I replied that Mrs. Fleming had been delusional and that my husband was not the sort to pay for something when he could get it for free and that when a ship is sinking, only a scoundrel would be concerned with something as frivolous as diamonds and gold.

  “But they were already lowering this boat when you got on,” said Mary Ann. “They stopped it for you. I know that for a fact. And that’s when Hardie got on, too. It’s possible your husband did pay him and you just failed to notice.”

  “I’m impressed you remember it so clearly, Mary Ann. I, for one, was in a complete panic. I ended up in a lifeboat and I’m glad I did, but I can’t for the life of me remember how it came about.”

  Night

  THAT NIGHT I slept not at all, or if I did, it would be more aptly described as a drifting in and out of consciousness, where the border between one state and the other was a wide territory that was more filled with mental activity and physical movement than the periods when I was awake. I think we were all fearful of being thrown overboard while we slept, which had the effect of causing people to start suddenly and to shout out whenever they ventured to cross the frontier into sleep. Mr. Preston, who had regained his seat on the rail, was still close enough to hit me with his fist when he started awake, shouting, “I can explain everything!” and another time he muttered, “The box couldn’t have been mine! I’m only an accountant, after all—what would I be doing with jewels?”

  I reached over to shake him fully awake, fearful that he might harm himself in his sleep. “Mr. Preston!” I cried. “Calm yourself!” But my own brain was experiencing the same sort of disordered thinking. At one moment I would be standing in front of our old house with Miranda, vowing to get it back for her, and at another, I would be holding on to Henry as he sank beneath the waves. At still another moment, after hours of trying to hold myself upright, I felt myself slipping, not off the thwart onto the damp boards that formed the bottom of the boat, but off the deck of the Empress Alexandra and into a sea that was teeming with bodies and debris. A child raised his face to me and stretched out his arms, but when I reached for him, his eyes turned red with little flames and he laughed a childish yet demonic laugh.

  Our anxiety that night was certainly due to the fact that the tensions that had been lurking beneath the surface had now been made explicit. Mrs. Grant had said what many people in the boat were thinking—that Mr. Hardie was no longer fit to lead us, that he had made several decisions based on some unstated purpose of his own, and that innocent people had died when, if we had played our hand differently, they might have been saved. Whether Mrs. Grant was right in her suspicions that Mr. Hardie had acted out of selfish motives or not, once they had been articulated, they could not be unsaid. Whatever the truth, our situation was now more perilous than it had ever been, for we felt ourselves threatened not only by the forces of nature, but by the human beings with whom we shared the boat.

  The night stretched on. Clouds obscured the moon, adding a thick cover of darkness that made it impossible to see who was stirring and who was crying out. I suspect Mrs. Grant had assigned some of the people sitting closest to Mr. Hardie to take turns watching him, and just before dawn, when one of the women
near him gave out a bloodcurdling scream, I was sure she was being murdered. A moment later, I heard a rustling and felt the balance of the boat shift and then I heard Mrs. Grant’s soothing voice telling whoever it was that whatever had frightened her had been nothing but a dream. Eventually, the sun cast its gray morning light on us, illuminating our floating world by nearly imperceptible degrees; but any hopes we had harbored during the night that a new dawn would erase the drama of the previous day were about to be shattered.

  Day Fourteen

  EVERYONE WAS STRANGELY calm when, once the day had fully dawned, Mrs. Grant called for a vote on whether Mr. Hardie should go over the side. I can only explain this equanimity by the trust that had been established between Mrs. Grant and the other passengers and that I have described before, or perhaps it was the fact that the day dawned windless, gray, and still. Only Anya Robeson displayed a kind of shocked attention, as if she were only now sensible of the events around her. “What about the other lifeboat?” she asked, making sure that her hands were covering her son’s ears. “If you don’t want him in this boat, couldn’t he go in that one?”

  When I think back, I credit Anya with trying to come up with some kind of middle ground, but at the time, the suggestion seemed highly unrealistic, almost grounded in delusional thinking. For one thing, the other boat was nowhere to be seen, so there was no real possibility of enlisting its aid. And for another, I think we had become so used to thinking of ourselves as separated from any sort of human society that the idea of succor coming from outside our little boat had long since stopped occurring to us. Mrs. Grant answered Anya kindly—I remember the tone, but not the exact words. “A yes vote means he dies,” added Hannah, so there would be no mistake about the purpose of the vote. Mary Ann, however, turned her wild eyes on me and hissed, “What? What is she asking?”

  I was more and more ruthless toward Mary Ann, who seemed to assume that people would take care of her despite her accusations and emotional instability. All along, her timid indecision had given me courage, but I did not credit her with giving me anything, only with taking. If the situation was bleak, I would not shield her from it. It was not in my nature to come up with metaphors she could understand or accept, as Hannah might have done. I found her questions silly and unnecessary, but because she was desperate to think that one of us had answers, she hung on every word I said. Often, after getting my attention, she would have nothing to say, or she would hope for an answer without having first to frame a question. I, too, was hungry for absolutes, and on some days it was only Mary Ann’s grasping desperation that lifted me above the compulsion to act in the same childish manner. If Mr. Hardie said, “The wind has shifted to the west,” she would say, “The west? Did he say west?”

  “Yes,” I would answer, or “No,” as the case might require, and mostly I told her the truth.

  “What does that mean?” she would ask, or “Which way is west?”

  I would use what little I knew of our position to tell her the grim facts: “It means we are being blown back toward England,” I said in those early days when we were desperate to hold our position. “Look on the bright side,” I added. “If we’re blown back far enough, you can get a brand-new dress for your wedding.” Hannah, however, would say something like “Think of it as a seesaw, Mary Ann. It’s bound to shift right back again.”

  Now we were being asked to make a difficult choice about Hardie’s culpability and about the resulting sentence, but I made it seem as if the problem were with Mary Ann’s lack of staunchness. “Oh, come now,” I said. “You can’t pretend we’re playing in the bathtub, Mary Ann. I’m sorry if you don’t like the choices, but the hard fact is that Mr. Hardie has become dangerous to the rest of us. He has lost his authority and his ability to make sound decisions. Either he goes overboard or we all drown, it’s as simple as that.”

  Even as I uttered them, I wondered if my words were true. I honestly did not know then and I don’t have any better idea now. When I looked at Mr. Hardie that morning, I was hard-pressed to recognize the superhuman figure of those first days in the boat. If Mr. Hardie was still godlike, he had become god in his human form, and we all know what happens to gods like that. Perhaps he had changed, or perhaps we had, or perhaps it was only the situation that was now calling for something new. But whether Mr. Hardie had changed or not, Mrs. Grant had only become more of whatever she had been at the first: solid, enduring, endlessly capable. But even more than those two people, it was the prevailing mood in the boat that needed to be assessed; and while I was putting Mary Ann off with whatever words came into my head, a deeper part of my consciousness was scrutinizing the faces of the people around me and trying to decipher their thoughts.

  Did I know in advance what the order of voting would be? As it happened, Mary Ann was called upon before I was. To a person sitting at a desk assessing the facts, this was perfectly predictable: in taking turns at Mr. Hardie’s roster of duties or in passing the cup of water around, we always started clockwise from where Mr. Hardie sat in the back of the boat, then proceeding up one thwart and down the next as we came to them, so it would be natural to assume that Mrs. Grant would follow a similar pattern, thus occasioning Mary Ann, who was now sitting on my right, to cast her vote before I was called upon to cast mine. Of course, Mr. Hardie had been in charge of the duty roster and Mrs. Grant was now running things, and there was no real reason to assume that she would adopt the same convention, but it had become a habit with us; and if I had thought it out beyond the first or second round of analysis—which I’m not sure I was capable of doing in my weakened state—I would have come to the conclusion that Mrs. Grant would want to keep things as normal as possible in order to convince us that this was just another of many routine duties, what anyone who found himself adrift in a lifeboat would be asked to do.

  In any case, Mary Ann voted before I did. After what I had said to her—I also said something like “Don’t think so much of yourself. Think of your Robert. Think of us, or think of yourself if you must, floundering around in the black water, struggling to prolong your life for a useless minute or two, not because it will do any good, but because struggling against death is the very nature of the beast”—Mary Ann hid her face and murmured pathetically, “I am not a beast,” before raising her hand and nodding her head to signal assent.

  Then came my turn. Mary Ann’s eyes remained hidden behind her clenched fists. Her hair fell forward in a knotty tangle. There were already enough votes to pass the resolution, so when Mrs. Grant and Hannah turned their eyes on me, I whispered, “I abstain. You don’t need my vote. Do whatever you like.” I’m not sure Hardie could hear my words from where he sat, but I shook my head, hoping he would think I had voted no. I still felt some obligation to the man in charge—to men in general—and, of course, to God, who I had always assumed was a man, albeit now I envisioned him in liquid form, capriciously rising up and threatening to drown us but keeping us alive to endure more of his capriciousness and threats.

  Hannah hissed something under her breath. Her emaciated face narrowed to a grimace. Her wound was a long red gash across her cheek. I could not hear her words, but to this day I can see her lips, which were cracked and bleeding like another wound carved in above the jut of her chin. “Coward,” she seemed to be saying, but Mrs. Grant calmed her with a touch and turned her impenetrable gaze on me for an instant, and I felt consoled, somewhat, for I too was partially under her spell. It was a gift Mrs. Grant had, of making a person feel understood. She had an even stronger effect on the other women than she had on me. They exchanged serene looks with her, and some of them were emboldened enough to look fearlessly at Hardie himself.

  If you counted the Italian women, who had raised their hands and wailed, though it was anyone’s guess whether or not they understood the issue before them, all of the women except Anya and me voted without hesitation to kill Mr. Hardie, and all of the men voted to save him. I still do not know how I would have voted if they had forced me to make a c
hoice. I stole a glance at Mr. Hardie. He was giving me a fixed and evil stare, and at that moment I might have sent them all to the devil, every man and woman of them, every wretched human speck.

  I repeat that we were weak. Even I find that hard to remember now, and I was there. The officials of the court seem absolutely incapable of comprehending our circumstances, and how could they? I only fault them because they failed to comprehend that they could not comprehend. My vision seemed to resonate, to echo. Primary images were confused with afterimages, with red and yellow splashes of light, with a watery smearing together of faces and features and the muted glimmer of the sun on the sea. “Resolution passed,” said Mrs. Grant. The Italian women looked eager and blank, as if now the way were cleared for our salvation. Mary Ann whimpered beside me, emitting thin, spasmodic sobs. I hated her then. “Stop it!” I shouted. “What good will it do? Isn’t it enough that we have to listen to the endless wailing of the wind?” But then the hopelessness of our position burst over me like one of the relentless green waves, and I put my arms around her and we clung to each other, her blond and tangled locks falling against my cheeks in exactly the same way that my dark and tangled locks fell against hers.

  So Mr. Hardie was to die. The problem now became one of getting him out of the boat. He was crouched on the aft thwart like the mongrel he was, baring his yellow teeth and snapping at the air. “Ye ’aven’t got me yet, ye ’aven’t got me yet,” he barked, and if the vote had been held then, I would have raised my voice and shouted, “Let the mangy mongrel die!”