The Lifeboat: A Novel by Charlotte Rogan

began, only to be interrupted by Mr. Hoffman, who scoffed, “I could have told you that!” But I asked Mr. Hoffman to be quiet, and Mr. Sinclair went on.
    “Aristotle distinguished between ‘memory,’ which he said even slow people are good at, and ‘recollection,’ at which clever people excel.” I don’t remember what he said next, but I understood him to mean that there could be no memory of the present, which involves only the perception of our senses, and that memory is the recoverable impression of a past event. Recollecting, however, is the recovery itself—the investigation or mnemonic process that leads one to a memory that is not instantly retrievable. I think about this now, since writing this account has involved much recollecting. Sometimes I remember one occurrence, and only later does another thing that happened come to mind, which leads to yet another and so on, in a long chain.
    Another time Mr. Sinclair told us about Sigmund Freud, who was revolutionizing the science of the mind and had written not so much about remembering as about forgetting and how forgetting always relates to the life drives, the greatest of which are to reproduce and to avoid death. In any case, I considered Mr. Sinclair the better storyteller, but most of the other women preferred Mrs. Cook.
    The night was moonless, and the air became increasingly oppressive and damp. My good feelings of the evening were gradually extinguished, though nothing particularly bad had happened except that Mr. Hardie remarked to Mr. Hoffman that before morning it would rain. A kind of unhinged laughter rippled through the boat when we imagined what new wretchedness rain would bring.
    After that, the talk stopped and we were left alone with our thoughts and the musical sound of the water against the bottom of the boat. Remarkably, we all slept those first nights, either taking our turn in the dormitory or leaning against each other or putting our heads in willing laps. We explained this by saying that we were exhausted, shocked—not knowing the depths our shock and exhaustion would eventually reach—but optimistic, practicing in our heads the language with which we would present our experiences when we got home.
    Sometime around midnight I was awakened by shouts. A man’s voice called out that he had seen lights in the distance. The sighting was unconfirmed, and though my eyes strained to pierce the obscurity of the night, I could see nothing. I slept again, and when I awoke just before dawn, I rose, intending to make my way to the little lavatory Henry and I had used on the ship before I remembered where I was and stuck one of the bailers up under my dress and urinated into it, making fussy little adjustments to my clothing and trying not to attract attention to myself. I mildly resented the men, who made no bones about unbuttoning their trousers and sending frothy streams out over the side of the boat. As time went on, this became less of a problem, for we were taking in so little water that our need to relieve ourselves became more and more infrequent. Even so, our resentments didn’t disappear. They only found new differences on which to light.

Day Four
     
    THE EPISODE IN the night—the false or at least unconfirmed sighting of lights—had an adverse effect on us. There were new renditions of the stories of the ship’s last moments, but the romance that had been washed over everything by the haunting beauty of the sunbeams and the singing of the previous afternoon was unequal to the task of dispelling the night’s disappointment, and we were overcome by a creeping gloom. This was exacerbated by the overcast day. All around us, the gray of the sky met the gray of the sea at an indistinct horizon. Hardie said, “The clouds aren’t white now, are they, Mrs. Winter?” and Maria began once again to stand up and pull at her clothes. “Sit down,” growled Hardie, “or I’ll have to tie ye.”
    Mrs. Grant called out, “Who was it that