Gill Paul - Women and Children First - Bravery, love and fate - the untold story of the doomed Titanic

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.

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.