Women and Children First: Bravery, love and fate: the untold story of the doomed Titanic

Chapter Five

Next morning at breakfast, Reg couldn’t meet Mrs Grayling’s eye, scared that something in his countenance might give away what he had seen on the boat deck. The situation was compounded when he overheard Mr Grayling being irascible with his wife. He seemed a bad-tempered sort, forever complaining about something: his food wasn’t hot enough, or the next table were making too much noise. That was forgivable, Reg supposed, but speaking discourteously to such a sweet-natured person was not.

‘Will you try out the gymnasium today, George?’ she asked. ‘You could have a Turkish bath afterwards. It’s supposed to have glorious mosaics.’

‘Have you taken leave of your senses? When have you ever known me go to a gymnasium or a Turkish bath?’ Mr Grayling’s tone was impatient, and as Reg arranged the cutlery for their chosen dishes, he couldn’t help noticing the hurt look on Mrs Grayling’s face. He remembered her commenting that marriage was hard work and watching her with Mr Grayling, Reg could imagine why she might feel that way.

‘I plan to stroll along the promenade this morning, then perhaps I shall write some postcards in the reading room,’ she told her husband. ‘How about you, dear?’

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet but when I do, I’ll be sure to inform you.’

His tone was heavy with sarcasm and Reg flinched. Mr Grayling seemed to be in a particularly foul mood, which was rum considering that, from what Reg had seen, he was having his cake and eating it. What right did he have to be bad-tempered, when he had both a charming wife and a willowy, goddess-like mistress?

He wasn’t the only grumpy one that morning. At one of Reg’s tables there was a young Canadian couple, Mr and Mrs Howson, and the wife was a silly, giggling girl who kept making eyes at Reg right under her husband’s nose. It was a game to her. Maybe she was trying to show hubbie that she was attractive to other men, but it put Reg in a very awkward situation. He tried to be strictly formal and avoid any eye contact, but Mrs Howson insisted on clutching his arm and asking inane questions.

‘What’s the difference between a herring and a haddock, Reg? I only like fish that don’t have any bones.’ She clutched his arm and peered up at him with doe eyes.

He felt like telling her that jellyfish were the only fish without bones and they didn’t have any on the menu. He also wanted to ask her to let go of his arm, but he did neither. ‘The herring have tiny bones throughout so you might be better with the haddock, ma’am.’

‘You always look after me so well,’ she purred, and her husband snorted. It was embarrassing, and Reg moved away from their table as quickly as he could.

As he worked, he kept an eye on the saloon door watching for the girl from the boat deck to arrive. He was curious to find out whether she was travelling with a husband or, if she was unmarried, who was chaperoning her. They certainly weren’t doing a very good job. Women like her would never travel alone. It simply wasn’t done.

First class was full of beautiful women. Some had looks that owed a substantial debt to artifice, but others were natural stunners. Even at breakfast, they wore fancy gowns in expensive velvets and silks with lace trimmings, and they all had hats with feathers and bows pinned to their heads. Every lady in first class wore a hat for breakfast and lunch and some kind of headdress for dinner. It was a regular fashion parade. Florence would have enjoyed looking at the clothes, he thought. She liked nice clothes. He’d gone with her a few times to browse through the rails in Tyrrell & Green’s department store, although she could seldom afford to buy more than a new pair of gloves or a length of lace to trim a petticoat.

Breakfast service ended at 10.30 and there had been no sign of the girl from the boat deck. Maybe she was having a lie-in, or perhaps she had chosen to dine at one of the ship’s cafés or the à la carte restaurant. He cleared the last plates from his tables and set them for luncheon, then caught his friend John’s eye and motioned with two fingers to his lips that he would meet him down in the mess for a fag. John nodded, but he had a table who were being slow to finish their meal, so Reg went on ahead.

He stopped in at the dorm to pick up his fags and wrinkled his nose at the vegetable smell of farts and feet and armpits; the twenty-seven men who slept there wouldn’t have a bath till they reached New York so it was sure to get worse each day. There were only two baths for the eight-hundred-plus crew members, and a separate one for the officers. Reg opened a couple of portholes and jammed them ajar with iron shoots from the store cupboard. That should help. Then he took the fags and matches and made his way to the stewards’ mess, where he sat down and waited for John to arrive so they could light up at the same time.

Reg wasn’t a big smoker. Some stewards were always nipping off for a fag and getting antsy when they were forced to go too long without one, but for Reg it was just a punctuation mark in the day, a chance to put his feet up and socialise. He collected the cigarette cards for his little brothers, and they’d never forgive him if he gave up, but generally he could take it or leave it.

‘You’ll never guess what I saw last night!’ Reg told John after they’d both exhaled the first drag. ‘One of my passengers, Mr Grayling, fooling around on the boat deck with a girl less than half his age while his wife is in their suite just a couple of decks below.’

John was unsurprised. ‘Goes on all the time with these people. They have different rules to you and me. It’s not just the men either. The women do it as well.’

‘Get away with you.’ Reg frowned.

‘Colonel Astor’s first wife had an affair and the whole of New York knew about it. They say his daughter isn’t really his. Now he’s got divorced and married again and they’re all pointing the finger and saying he shouldn’t have remarried, but if you ask me his wife was the one that started it.’

Reg had heard something of the kind before but hadn’t paid much attention. ‘They sit in your section, don’t they? What do you think of the new wife?’

John wrinkled his nose and gave it some thought. ‘Bit of a mousy thing. She’ll let him be the boss, though. She won’t be running off with fancy men, not like the last one.’

‘She’s only young. Eighteen, I heard, and he’s nearly fifty. I don’t know why a girl would want to do that.’

John rolled his eyes comically. ‘Hundred million dollars in the bank? I’d marry him for that!’

‘I don’t think you’re his type somehow.’ John would never win any beauty contests, but he was the nicest chap you could ever hope to meet.

They’d become friends on Reg’s first voyage after some of the other lads played a practical joke on him. He’d been working flat out from five in the morning and got to the dorm at eleven that night so faint with exhaustion that he was hoping to fall straight into his bunk. But as he walked in the door, he heard stifled laughter and sensed something was up. Sure enough, there was a huge metal object jammed into the space between his bunk and the one above: a dessert trolley from the dining room. It was about five feet long, two feet wide and felt as though it weighed a ton.

‘You bastards!’ Reg swore and the room erupted into laughter. He grabbed the trolley’s handle and tried to yank it out but it was jammed in tightly and hard to manoeuvre. ‘Bloody hell, I don’t believe it.’

‘Here you go, man. I’ll give you a hand.’ John skipped round the other side of the bunk to push from behind, while Reg pulled, and soon they had the dessert trolley back on the floor again.

‘Thanks, mate,’ Reg nodded, and from then on they were pals. They covered for each other on the ship and watched each other’s backs when their shipmates were fooling around. It was like having a brother on board.

Reg had hoped John would have some advice for him regarding Mr Grayling’s infidelity, and in particular if there was anything he should do about it. ‘You should have seen this girl who was with him on the boat deck,’ he reiterated. ‘She was the bee’s knees. I’ll point her out at luncheon. It didn’t make sense somehow.’

It was only afterwards he realised he’d forgotten to tell John about the fur coat, in some ways the strangest part of the scene he had witnessed. He made a mental note to mention it later.

Chapter Six

After breakfast Margaret Grayling found a deckchair on the promenade and sat staring out at the ocean with a huge lump in her throat, her eyes watering in the salt breeze. George, her husband, had been more than usually difficult during this voyage. He’d always been a cold man but his rudeness to her had previously been confined to their moments alone. He would never have spoken discourteously to her in front of the servants at their Madison Avenue home, yet he was prepared to do so in front of a steward on the Titanic, when all around them sat the cream of New York high society, no doubt listening in.

In private, George had renewed his demands that she should divorce him, but the idea was anathema to her. It was against every religious principle she held dear. They had been married in the sight of God and the minister had clearly said, ‘What God hath joined together, let no man cast asunder.’ How could she go against God’s commandment?

George didn’t share her religious beliefs and seemed to think she was merely worried about what society might say. In 1912, divorce caused a scandal and there was no question that both parties were stigmatised by it, even when one was blameless. But Margaret had never given much weight to the opinions of society. She didn’t engage in the complex sets of social rules that dictated the parties and dinners to which you were invited, the box in which you appeared at the opera, or which ladies left visiting cards at your door. She had more or less stopped appearing in society seven years earlier, after great tragedy had rent her life apart.

Theirs had never been a passionate marriage but it had produced a daughter, a gentle, artistic girl called Alice, who was the sun around which they both revolved and the cement that kept their marriage civil and sometimes even happy throughout the seventeen years of her life. When Alice died of scarlet fever in February 1905, everything had collapsed inwards. In the cruellest of all the cruel things George had ever hurled at her, he screamed that it was her fault, that she had been responsible for killing their daughter, and from that fatal wound their marriage had never recovered.

Rationally, Margaret knew it was simply not true. She and Alice had visited friends of hers and two days after the visit, it transpired that one of the friends had succumbed to scarlet fever, despite showing no signs of it when they were there. And then Alice developed a sore throat and pink cheeks and a sand-papery rash on her chest and neck. Her friend recovered within a week but Alice’s condition had continued to deteriorate. She struggled for breath and was rarely fully conscious during her last days. George paid for the advice of every specialist in New York and beyond, throwing money at the problem, but to no avail. In the small hours of the night, Alice’s breathing became fainter and fainter, then stopped altogether.

A solitary tear trickled down Margaret’s cheek. Grief like that never left you. It abated sometimes, just for a while, then returned to thump you in the gut and knock you backwards when you least expected it. It was something she would always live with. But George turned all his grief into anger directed towards his wife. All the intimacy of their marriage, such as there had been, mutated into cold silence or bitter recrimination. She missed the days when they used to be a team, lying in bed together discussing Alice’s small triumphs. She missed the occasional gesture of physical affection. Even a simple peck on the cheek would mean so much now but there was no chance of that. Never again.

She’d hoped this trip to Europe could achieve some kind of rapprochement. She’d begged him to bring her along, hoping that the unfamiliar surroundings might re-ignite some companionship at least, but to no avail. He had left her on her own for several weeks in a hotel in Bologna, claiming that he had business to conduct, then insisted on cutting short the vacation and rushing to catch Titanic’s maiden voyage. Nothing had been gained by the trip. They were returning to the aching loneliness of the mansion where they lived separate lives under the same roof.

Should she go against God’s will and give George his divorce so that each had a chance of happiness in the future? The more she observed other marriages, the more she believed that women seemed most content who lived on their own.

There was a Canadian couple in the dining saloon, the Howsons, who were a terrible advertisement for the institution. Married less than a year, they were already disappointed in each other. Neither had fulfilled the other’s expectations. Margaret knew them slightly and could see where the fault lines lay. She hated that he gambled or, more particularly, that he gambled and lost. He hated the money she spent on clothes and fripperies. He’d been a bachelor throughout his twenties and had never realised quite how much a new gown cost, nor how many were required to see a fashionable woman through the season. On the Titanic, first-class women would never dare turn up to dinner in a gown they had worn before. Each evening required a lavish new creation.

There was something more, Margaret mused. They had moved to New York after their marriage and he had hoped to gain immediate acceptance in high society through his wife, who came from a better family. He had no concept that to reach the inner circle of the kind of high-society grandees travelling on the ship would take careful calculation and manoeuvring over at least a year, and even then they might never get there since he worked in property. Being Canadian stood against them as well. They might be endured for the course of the voyage but no new invitations would be delivered to their butler on their return.

Margaret could view all this from a distance and see the futility of their ambitions and desires in the context of a life. So many other things were more important, but the young could never understand that. To them social position was everything, since a wag had said back in the 1880s that there were only four hundred fashionable people in New York (the exact number that would fit in Mrs William Astor’s ballroom). The term ‘The Four Hundred’ had been coined and instantly everyone began scrabbling for their place in the hallowed ranks. The irony was that the harder you tried, the less eligible you appeared, and she knew the Howsons would never get there. Would that prove a rupture that would tear their marriage apart?

Mrs Howson’s flirtatiousness with Reg was awkward for the boy. He dealt with it professionally, but it couldn’t be easy when you are trained to be polite to all passengers. You can’t take sides between husband and wife.

She wondered if marriage would be easier when you came from Reg’s class. Surely things would be simpler without all the rules about status that bedevilled her own class? His girl, Florence, sounded like a sweetheart, but Reg had intimated that he was hesitating about taking the step of getting engaged. Maybe it was hardly surprising given all the bickering couples he saw on the ships where he worked. He didn’t want to make a mistake. He was a good person, and wouldn’t have led her on for – what was it? – two years now if he didn’t genuinely love her.

Margaret had taken a liking to Reg. He had the looks of a moving picture star but seemed unaware of it. There was no trace of the vanity that afflicted many handsome men she had met, who checked their appearance in every reflective surface and strutted arrogantly into rooms, watching for a reaction. Reg seemed modest and introspective, and an all-round good sort.

During the Mediterranean voyage, she had witnessed an incident that he didn’t know she had seen. His friend John had been looking very queasy during breakfast service one morning, as if he had a stomach upset, and he had suddenly rushed off, leaving a pile of soiled plates on a table near the entrance, where arriving guests would see them. The chief steward noticed them and became instantly enraged. His eyes swept the room looking for someone to blame, and in an instant Reg was by his side. Margaret was close enough to overhear their exchange.

‘I’m sorry, sir, I only put them down for a moment. It won’t happen again,’ Reg said, and relayed them quickly to the pantry, letting John off the hook.

That’s one of the reasons he was Margaret’s favourite steward, but she also liked a sense that he had hidden depths. He was a sensitive person, who thought about the world and all that he saw of it. When they talked, he really looked at her and seemed to see beneath the surface.

There was something else, as well. Reg was an independent type. Deep down, despite his bosom friendship with John, she sensed a loneliness in him, and that’s what attracted her. They were alike in that, for she was herself perhaps the loneliest woman in the world.

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