‘Hey, Mand,’ he called down the stairs. ‘Gonna start with the attic… go top down.’
His sister came to the foot of the stairs. ‘Ever the logical one,’ she said with a smile. ‘You need a hand?’
‘No. You start at the bottom and we should meet in the middle… in about a month!’
In all the years he lived in this house he had ventured into the attic just once, and had put his foot through the ceiling of his parent’s bedroom. It was the only time he had been beaten by his father and he had never considered returning.
The attic ladder slipped down easily. Geoff clambered up and flicked on a single naked bulb hanging from a rafter. He could see at least a dozen tea chests stacked neatly to one side of the space.
Pulling a torch from his pocket, he began to look around. Removing the lid from the nearest wooden box, the first thing he saw was a neatly folded college scarf.
‘Wow!’ he exclaimed. ‘I’d forgotten I ever had that!’ It was his scarf from UCLA, pale blue and yellow. He had bought it the first morning there. That day he had embarked on what was to become a life in academia. Six years ago he had been awarded the chair of Marine Studies at the University of Tampa.
He closed the lid and panned round with the torch beam. The rafters were hung with cobwebs and the air smelled of old books. He noticed a couple of piles of what looked like encyclopedias stacked against the towers of tea chests. He lifted the top one, blew away the dust and read: Encyclopedia of Natural Science, Vol. 4.
Turning to his right, he spotted the water tank, heard it gurgle, and made a mental note to switch off the water at the mains. He cast the torch beam around and was about to swing back to the old boxes when the light caught a large faded leather trunk. He recognized it vaguely as being one of the massive trunks his father would strap to the roof rack of the Oldsmobile before the family headed towards the freeway and their regular holiday spot in the Catskills.
Geoff picked his way over, ducking under a low beam and crouching in front of the trunk. It was covered with a thick layer of dust and he could see a few patches of mould at one end of the lid. The brass lock at the front had tarnished. He knelt down and went to release the lock. It was a little stiff, but gave, and he eased up the heavy top, letting it rest back against the brick wall behind it.
It was almost completely empty. To the right lay a wooden box, a cheap mass-produced container with gaudy beads around the rim. He lifted it and opened the lid. Inside lay an old pen, an inkwell and a few inexpensive bracelets. He returned it to the trunk and spotted an ancient teddy bear propped up behind a stack of books. It was Gerald, his favourite toy when he was six.
A biscuit tin rested on top of the books. It looked incredibly quaint, edged in a tarnished gold pattern, the lid carrying the image of a woman in a flour-speckled apron, her hair pulled back, sleeves rolled up. Many years ago this tin had been in the kitchen. He had a clear image of himself sneaking a biscuit from it one morning before leaving for school.
Geoff laid it on the attic floor and prised open the lid. Inside was a pile of old black and white photographs. He lifted them out.
The first was a picture of his parents. They looked young. He guessed it had been snapped around the time they were married. Then there were half a dozen photographs of him and Amanda at various ages: playing in the yard, on a rocking horse, winning a three-legged race at school. He placed them carefully back in the biscuit tin and noticed at the bottom of the pile a very old photograph he had never seen before. It was of a short, slender man in a suit and tie. He was standing on the corner of a street, an old-fashioned car parked behind him. It looked like the picture must have been taken in the late 1920s, maybe early 1930s. Then he recognized the face. It was his grandfather, William.
William, or Billy as he was called in the family, had died in 1981. Geoff was nineteen at the time and he had loved the old man dearly, but he felt as though he had never really known him as well as he would have liked. There was always some sort of barrier there. It was a feeling others in the family shared. His mother, Margaret, Billy’s daughter-in-law, had once told him that she had felt the same thing. She loved Billy, but she sensed he could never give all of himself to anyone and put it down to the traumatic experience that had shaped his life… his rescue from the Titanic when he was twelve years old.
Geoff shook his head. ‘So many memories,’ he said aloud and surveyed the other end of the trunk. He saw a square of moth-eaten brown velvet, and lying beneath this another box. This one was made from what looked like mahogany. Geoff had no recollection of ever seeing it before. He lifted it, eased it open and held it up to the light. A roll of papers wrapped in a frayed and faded red silk ribbon lay inside. Intrigued, Geoff lifted it out, pulled off the ribbon and unfurled the pages to reveal a wad of papers covered with closely packed mathematical symbols. On top of this was a letter. The paper was desiccated, the ink faded to an orange-brown. He started to read.
August 7, 1945.
Yesterday, my country exploded an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, while this morning, my eldest son, Thomas, has been accepted into Yale. For me, these two events share an odd synchronicity.
I don’t ever speak of the Titanic, and even my beloved wife Geraldine knows only parts of my story.
I was coming up to my thirteenth birthday when my aunt and uncle told me they had decided that we would be leaving for America and a hoped-for new life of opportunity.
We travelled Third Class, of course, and even getting the 32 pounds and 10 shillings to pay the fare for a family of nine must have been a task in itself.
I remember I was a bit of a tearaway and I had a fondness for exploring the ship. It was a game evading the crew, sneaking around First Class. That was how I met Mr Wickins.
Well, he told me his name was Wickins and that he was a schoolteacher. It was only later, just as we said goodbye for the last time, that he confided in me that his real name was Dr Egbert Fortescue and that he was actually a scientist.
He was an extraordinary man and he had an extraordinary tale to tell. He was on a mission to take what he called ‘a special chemical’ to America and he had some notes on his theories that he was to pass on to another scientist there. When he knew that he could not survive, he gave me the notes and wrote on a sheet of paper the name and address of the person I should give them to.
Sadly, fate took a hand. I remember it as though it were yesterday. I was being lowered into a lifeboat. Dr Fortescue, almost lost in the crowd, was waving farewell from the deck. The front page of Egbert Fortescue’s notes flew off into the Atlantic breeze before I could read it. At that moment, I knew that history had taken a strange and unexpected turn.
The six hours that followed are lost to me. The next memory I have is of the sun breaking over the horizon as though nothing had happened. I was in a lifeboat squeezed together with forty or fifty others and I saw a rescue boat slicing through the water headed straight for us. Within an hour I was aboard the Carpathia, the ship that came to the rescue of those who had survived the sinking.
We all arrived in New York around the time we had originally expected, but under very different circumstances, of course. Thousands of people lined the shore as the ship pulled into Pier 54. Some reports in the newspapers said there were over forty thousand well-wishers there that day.