The Midnight Watch by David Dyer Page A

time it was different. When he tried to write it down, it changed yet again.
    ‘You saw her rockets,’ Groves continued, ‘you remember that, at least. You told me about them this morning – “Yes, old chap, I saw her rockets on my watch.” That’s what you said. It was your very first thought. So you can write that down for starters.’
    ‘But the captain says I didn’t see her rockets. He says they were too low and faint to be distress rockets.’
    ‘But he was asleep below. You were on the bridge. You saw them. What did you think they were?’
    ‘I called down to the captain about them.’
    ‘And what did he say?’
    ‘He told me to watch her.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘To Morse her.’
    ‘So you watched her and Morsed her.’
    ‘Yes. That’s what I did.’
    ‘Then that’s what you write.’
    Groves spoke as if he were stating a simple solution to a simple problem, but his face had darkened. His eyes disappeared into the shadow of his cap as he leaned forward and his lips were drawn tight between his teeth. He turned away, and Stone sensed exasperation – disgust, even. He suspected Groves was thinking that if he, Groves, had seen the rockets, he would have done more than watch and Morse. Stone had seen him leap into the water from a pier without a moment’s thought to rescue a woman’s parasol; he would think even less about waking the wireless operator in the middle of the night, or hauling the captain up to the bridge. ‘People expect to get woken up on ships,’ Groves had once told him. And each night, Stone knew, Groves woke Evans on his way down from his watch just to get the gossip.
    The standby quartermaster sounded the first bell of the watch. But still the third officer lingered. He seemed to be building up to something. When at last he spoke, he was tentative and thoughtful.
    ‘We all have to live with this, you know,’ he said. ‘You’re not the only one with this thing on his mind.’
    ‘But you have nothing to trouble yourself with.’
    ‘That’s not so. I could have saved everyone.’
    Stone looked at him in astonished silence.
    ‘I was in the wireless room,’ Groves continued. ‘I had the head-phones on. If I’d wound up the detector I would have heard her. She was calling for help by then. Sparks told me this morning that the detector had wound down.’ He paused, hanging his head. ‘Sparks has shown me before how to wind it. I knew how. I just didn’t notice.’
    Stone stared hard at him. For Groves there was a straightforward causation: if he had thought to wind up the machinery, he could have saved everyone. But the moral quality of that omission, Stone knew as he nervously clutched his notebook and searched his friend’s face for sympathy, was very different from that of his own. Groves had had no hint at all that anything was wrong, but he, Stone, had seen the rockets.
    When Groves at last left the bridge, Stone stood alone beneath the great canopy of the sky. There were no longer any men on the foredeck. The derrick booms were stowed, the decks were secured, life on the Californian had recovered its ordinary rhythm. He leaned against the forward bridge rail, rested his notebook on the steel ledge and began to write.
    *   *   *
    There was fire in the makeup of donkeyman Ernest Gill. His father was a blacksmith’s assistant, and as a child Ernie had played among the glowing forges of Sheffield as freely as other children might play among trees and meadows. He knew from the very beginning that his would be a tough life – every day his father told him so, and said, too, that with all these fires about they would never be far from hell. Ernie was fascinated by the red-hot iron and leaned as close as he dared when his father beat and shaped it with a hammer. ‘You see,’ his father used to say, ‘apply enough heat and anything will bend.’
    Ernie liked school. He had ideas, and when he spoke he found that other boys would gather to listen. A teacher taught