On a Cold Dark Sea(60)

“Charlotte?” said the man everyone knew as Reggie Evers, but who to Charlotte would always be Georgie.

As if in a dream, she tried to speak but couldn’t. It seemed impossible that the two of them should be here, on this sunny California afternoon, when they’d last seen each other on the rain-soaked deck of the Carpathia. One impulsive decision had led to two utterly different lives. His golden hair was darker now, and his jawline was more prominent. He’d aged, yes, but was still entirely, recognizably Georgie.

He walked over, his mouth twisted in a rigid smile. “I think this calls for a drink.”

Georgie ushered Charlotte toward a cart crammed with cut-glass decanters. So much for Prohibition. Georgie poured them both a scotch and soda, then held up his glass. Charlotte raised hers in response.

“To old friends,” Georgie said.

We were never friends, Charlotte thought. “Not too old, I hope,” she said instead.

It was enough to break the tension, and Georgie laughed. Charlotte took a sip of her drink; he’d mixed it strong. The two men in tennis whites came jogging over with their rackets, and one called out, “Reggie! You’re taking me on next!”

Georgie waved him away. “I am otherwise occupied.” Very upper-crust posh, as if he’d just come from the House of Lords. “Try Dunkie instead. Five dollars he beats you in straight sets.”

There was a round of laughter, a sense of Georgie as the indulgent father amused by the youngsters’ antics.

“Let’s go inside,” Georgie suggested, and Charlotte followed him back to the house.

He led her down a hallway to his office, where the first thing she noticed was a massive wood desk and the second thing she noticed was the photograph on top, of Georgie with Mary Pickford. If the goal was to impress visitors, it worked.

“Where do we start?” Georgie asked, his bemusement barely masking his nervousness. “How long has it been?”

“Twenty years,” said Charlotte. And then, because she already felt bad for catching him off guard, “Georgie, I’m sorry . . .”

“Georgie. I can’t remember the last time someone called me that. Well—I suppose I can. It must have been you.”

Those terrible, bewildering days aboard the Carpathia. Charlotte remembered, viscerally, the first hours after the lifeboat, as she had wandered the decks, searching each knot of survivors for Reg’s face. The smell of the blanket flung over her shoulders, wooly and damp. Some men had made it into the final lifeboats; others had been pulled from the water. If there was anyone who knew how to wriggle out of a seemingly doomed situation, it was Reg.

Instead, she found Georgie, huddled in a deck chair, his face drawn and pale. Georgie, whose suffering only enhanced his good looks, like a boyish saint in a Renaissance painting. Charlotte’s heart lurched, and she ran to the chair, her face etched with a silent question.

Georgie shook his head. “Reg didn’t make it.”

“How do you know?” she demanded.

“I saw him die.”

In a dull monotone, Georgie told Charlotte what had happened. They’d been near the stern, unsure what to do as the deck continued to tilt, and then there’d been an enormous roar. Some sort of explosion that toppled one of the smokestacks. A twisted piece of metal crashed into Reg’s face—it must have killed him instantly—and Georgie had barely enough time to register the horror of it before a force pushed him backward, over the rails. Disoriented and desperate, he’d splashed and shouted until he reached an overturned lifeboat that had been swept off the ship. For hours, he and twenty others had stood on its sloped keel, clinging to each other to keep upright, leaning to keep their balance with each swell of the sea.

Georgie told the story in a flat, detached voice, as if none of it mattered, and Charlotte churned with rage. How could a useless idiot like Georgie be alive when Reg was dead?

Two officers were working their way along the deck, writing down messages from the Titanic survivors to be wired to their relatives. The men spoke in hushed voices, deferential in the face of suffering.

“What am I to do?” Georgie mumbled, eyes cast downward, fingers picking at the edge of his coat.

I couldn’t care less what you do, Charlotte thought. I never want to see you again.

“Tell your parents you’re all right,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. Georgie looked ready to cry, and she hadn’t the patience for a scene. “They’ll wire money to you in New York, won’t they? Then you can go home.”

“I can’t go back!” Georgie’s eyes pleaded with hers, frantic. “My father disowned me. He said he’d rather I was dead than disgrace the family.” To Charlotte’s disgust, tears began trickling down his cheeks. “Now he’s got his wish. There’s nothing left for me, with Reg gone. I should have died, too.”

Charlotte almost said it: I wish you had. Georgie’s whiny self-pity was more than she could take.

“What shall we do?” he asked.

We? Charlotte hadn’t any intention of linking her future with Georgie’s. But the very last remnants of her loyalty to Reg stopped her from walking away. A wisp of an idea took hold, solidifying as she examined it from all angles. It could work.

“What if you were dead?” she asked.

Georgie stared at her, wide-eyed.