Women and Children First: Bravery, love and fate: the untold story of the doomed Titanic. Gill Paul
gawping? He’d feel terrible, knowing he could have prevented it. Should he make some kind of sound so she knew he was there? He could approach and ask if he might fetch anything for her. He rehearsed the words in his head. ‘Good evening, ma’am. May I be of assistance?’
She turned again and just at that moment, Reg noticed a figure coming up the Grand Staircase and emerging onto the deck. He walked past a lamp and Reg saw that it was Mr Grayling, an American gentleman whose table he waited on in the first-class dining saloon. He could easily have spotted Reg hovering on the steps to the bridge, but he didn’t look that way. Instead, he strode directly towards the lifeboat where the girl was waiting. As she saw him approach, she gave a little cry, ran towards him, and threw herself into his arms. Her tiny white figure was enveloped in his large, dark-suited one.
Mr Grayling held her close for a while then he leaned back to cup her chin in his hands. He said something to her, but Reg could only catch the word ‘sorry’, before he bent to kiss her full on the mouth. She raised her pale, thin arms around his neck, while he placed a protective hand in the small of her back. It was a posture so intimate Reg knew that they had to be lovers, and not just new lovers. There was a familiarity about their passion. Perhaps they had been apart for some time and this was their reunion.
An awful fact nagged at Reg’s brain as he stood watching. Mr Grayling was married to a woman Reg knew and liked, who was with him on this trip. He’d waited on Mrs Grayling on a Mediterranean cruise the previous year, when she’d been travelling with a woman friend, and they’d had several friendly conversations. Reg had been touched that she remembered him this time and professed herself delighted to see him once more. She was nicer than any other passenger in first class, where familiarity with the staff was somewhat frowned upon. How could Mr Grayling betray her? What kind of a man would bring his mistress onto the same ship as his wife?
The lovers slipped in behind the lifeboat, still caught up in their embrace, and Reg decided he had best get a move on before he was spotted. They wouldn’t be at all pleased if they thought they were being spied upon. He knew to his cost that if a first-class passenger made a complaint against a steward it would always be believed, no matter how unjust the circumstances. On his last voyage, an elderly gentleman had lost a silver cigar case and accused Reg of stealing it. His belongings were searched and of course it wasn’t found. It finally turned up under a table in the smoking room, but Reg knew the incident was recorded in his particulars at the White Star Line office. He’d seen it with his own eyes when he signed on for this voyage. There was an indelible shadow on his record because of it. He’d protested indignantly to the secretary at the employment office but was told it was just a record of an event, and nothing would make them remove it.
Reg stamped his foot on the step and walked down with a heavy footfall, so no one could accuse him of sneaking around. At the bottom of the steps he turned left towards the port side of the ship so as not to pass Mr Grayling and the girl, who were on the starboard. When he reached the Grand Staircase, he didn’t look back but hurried down. He caught the elevator to D deck, said good night to the night shift operator, then descended a further flight of stairs to Scotland Road, a corridor stretching half the length of the ship, where he had a berth in a dormitory with twenty-seven other saloon stewards. It was one-thirty, and he had precisely four hours to sleep before it was time to get up and prepare for breakfast service.
Chapter Two
Lady Juliette Mason-Parker knelt on the bathroom floor, acid scorching her throat and the taste of vomit in her mouth. The floor was tiled with a black and white diagonal diamond-within-diamond motif. Some diamonds had black centres while others were white. She counted the number from the toilet across to the bath: exactly fourteen. Who decided that? Was it calculated precisely to work that way? She supposed it must be. Everything on the Titanic seemed meticulously designed, nothing left to chance.
The bathroom fittings were real marble. It seemed remarkable to her that the ship could stay afloat with the weight of all its fixtures and fittings: the library full of books, the swimming pool, the extravagant cut-glass chandeliers in every public room, the carved oak panelling on the walls and the enormous pieces of mahogany furniture. It was much more luxurious than their draughty family pile in Gloucestershire. A student of decorative styles could learn all they needed on board, Juliette mused, as they wandered from the Jacobean dining saloon to the Louis XIV restaurant to the Georgian-style lounge. Their suite had a French feel, with tapestries in rococo frames on the walls and heavy patterned drapes closing off the sleeping areas during daytime.
In the next room, her mother slept soundly, occasionally snuffling and murmuring in her sleep. The last thing Juliette wanted was for her to awake and start fussing. If ever there was a woman who enjoyed fussing, it was Lady Mason-Parker. She had been irritating Juliette beyond measure on this voyage. If it wasn’t her endless advice on which hat to wear for breakfast, and which gown was suitable for walking on the promenade in the afternoon, then it was her lectures on how to ensnare a husband, with methods that Juliette considered had gone out with Jane Austen. Men nowadays liked women with a bit of conversation in them rather than smiling fools, but Lady Mason-Parker felt that Juliette’s forthright opinions scared them off. So far mother and daughter hadn’t argued outright but tetchy barbs had been fired back and forth.
Suddenly Juliette spotted the lid of her pot of cherry tooth powder in the gap between the washbasin and the toilet. Throwing up in the middle of the night had its uses after all. She squeezed her hand in to retrieve it, then considered whether the nausea had subsided enough for her to wash out her mouth and return to bed. She rose tentatively, holding onto the basin’s edge, and regarded herself in the mirror.
Her blonde hair was pinned into waves, which were supposed to hold it in the style of the moment once the pins were removed in the morning. Whoever designed it had paid no regard to the fact that ladies had to attempt to sleep while being stabbed in a dozen different spots on their heads. Her eyes had bruised circles underneath and her skin without makeup had a faint greenish tinge. She would never get a husband looking like this, certainly not the rich American one her mother had in mind. And there was the added complication that it had to be done within a couple of months, from first meeting to proposal to marriage ceremony. The problem was that Juliette was pregnant. It was only eight weeks since the one and only time she’d had intercourse, but the signs were unmistakable. When she first caught her daughter throwing up and prised the truth out of her, Lady Mason-Parker had swung into action like a military commander.
‘We need to find you a husband straight away. English men dither so, but a rich American would be ideal. They would be over the moon to get themselves a real English Lady for a wife, and they tend to be more impulsive than Englishmen when they fall in love.’
Juliette was horrified. ‘Mother, you can’t be serious! I’m not interested in tricking some poor Yankee dupe into holy matrimony. It’s hideously immoral.’
‘What you did to get yourself into this condition was immoral. Getting married is the way to fix it, and your husband will be delighted to have a child so soon. It will prove you’re good breeding stock.’
‘I’m not a farm animal! And I refuse to cooperate with your schemes.’
Juliette’s protests were in vain. Her mother booked them a passage on the Titanic’s maiden voyage, calculating that the ship would be overflowing with eligible American millionaires. Since they sailed, she had occupied herself making enquiries of crusty dowagers in the lounge and arranging introductions to crass Americans who sold automobile components or garden fencing. Juliette had no choice but to converse with the men in question, but at some stage she would find a way to put them off. Mentioning her support for women’s suffrage seemed a foolproof method.
‘Have you chained yourself to the railings at Parliament yet?’ one gent had asked tentatively at dinner that evening.
‘No, but I rather think I might some time,’ Juliette had replied. ‘It looks fun.’
‘She’s joking, of course.’ Her mother leapt in to try and salvage the relationship, but the merest