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

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      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 СКАЧАТЬ