Women and Children First (33 page)

In Saratoga Springs, the temperature shot up into the nineties and Juliette’s belly grew bigger by the day. She didn’t sleep well at night, partly because of the heat and partly because her bump wouldn’t allow her to lie in her favourite face-down, spread-eagle position any more. During the day, she went for short walks in the vicinity of the cottage but was usually driven back by biting insects. The air was thick with buzzing, stinging, flapping creatures and before long her face and hands were covered in swollen, itchy lumps.

‘Rub your skin with some lemon juice before you go outside,’ Edna advised, and that helped a little but wasn’t foolproof. Some of the ‘little critters’, as Edna called them, seemed to have a taste for lemon.

They had brought books with them but it was hard to summon the concentration for reading. The entire focus of Juliette’s day lay in writing a letter to Robert and waiting for the mail to arrive so she could read his replies. They were her umbilical cord with the outside world where people went out for dinner and rode horses and formed friendships and fell in love.

Robert wrote about his business, about the choking heat of the city, about a young niece who was visiting town whom he had promised to show around, and about events in the news. Captain Scott still had not been found and all parties had given up hope of finding him alive. The US government had instituted an eight-hour working day and many companies feared it would put them out of business. And during an eventful marathon at the Summer Olympic Games in Stockholm one runner went missing while another died of a heart attack. At the end of his letters, Robert never failed to say how much he loved her and was looking forward to seeing her again.

Juliette pored over the
New York Times
so she had interesting items to write back to him about. She devised witty descriptions of the biting creatures who were so desperate for her blood. She wrote about her family, drawing character sketches of each. In one letter, she described the cynical way in which Venetia, an old acquaintance, had seduced her brother Wills two years previously, hoping to get him to propose – until she found out that the Mason-Parker estate had a lot of land and property but not enough cash to keep her in ballgowns and jewels, at which point she promptly disappeared. Juliette wrote that Wills had become cynical about women since then, seeing them as scheming, heartless, untrustworthy creatures, and had not entered into any further affairs of the heart.

When she finished the letter she sat back to read it through and was overcome with guilt. Wasn’t she being a scheming, untrustworthy creature herself? Who was she to say that of another woman? The difference between her and Venetia was that she loved Robert whereas her erstwhile friend had only ever loved herself, but there were times when it felt like a fine line. How could she trick Robert when she cared about him so deeply? She ran through the arguments again, but always came up with the same conclusion – that she had no choice.

More than two months after it sank, women’s magazines still dwelt endlessly on the
Titanic
. Each issue had a new story about the plight of some passenger or other. Juliette read about Ida Straus, who had refused point blank to leave her husband of forty-one years. Many had heard her announcing ‘We have been together these many years. Where you go, I go.’ Juliette decided that she would almost certainly have insisted on staying behind with Robert, because when she was with him she felt safe. On the other hand, he would mostly likely have tried to order her into a lifeboat, as many other husbands had done.

What was strange was that it all felt like a story now, rather than something that had happened to her only ten weeks earlier.

‘Do you still think much about the
Titanic
, Mother?’ she asked over luncheon.

‘Of course. Every morning when I wake up, I look for my mother’s locket and when it’s not there by my bedside it makes me start the day in a melancholy frame of mind. It was all I had left of her that was personal.’

Juliette hadn’t known her grandmother, who died before she was born, but she suddenly realised how much her mother must have loved her. When Lady Mason-Parker complained on board the
Carpathia
about the loss of her family jewellery, Juliette had been embarrassed by her seeming crassness in the light of the huge losses others had suffered. But now she could see that it wasn’t so much the objects themselves as what they represented that her mother mourned.

Perhaps, if nothing else, they would come to a greater understanding of each other during this summer of forced detention. Perhaps they would even become friends.

Mr Frank insisted that Mr Grayling’s chauffeur drove Reg downtown to the hotel in which John’s mother and sister were staying. It wasn’t far from the hostel where he had slept on the first night he came ashore. He took with him all the money he had in the world: Mrs Grayling’s five pounds, the three pounds ten shillings which were John’s final salary from White Star, and almost fifty dollars he had saved on his own account. He reckoned that should cover the cost of their tickets across to America if they had come in a third-class cabin, but he would need to save as much again for the return trip and more besides for their hotel bill.

On the way, Reg didn’t plan what he would say. All he could do now was be completely, uncompromisingly honest, and apologise from the bottom of his heart.

The women were expecting him and he was shown into a dingy drawing room. They’d chosen a very cheap hotel. Both were red-eyed and looked as though they hadn’t slept much, but Mary rose to shake his hand in greeting.

‘I’m sorry if we got you into trouble at your work yesterday,’ she began. ‘We were in such shock we weren’t thinking about your position.’

‘Please,’ Reg begged them. ‘Please, whatever you do, don’t apologise to me. If I were to apologise to you a million times it could never be enough for what I’ve done to you and your family.’

‘Sit down, lad. If you don’t mind, we have a lot of questions for you, but first I’ll ask if they can bring us some tea. We have a lot of talking to do and I don’t want us getting dry in the throat.’

Reg took a seat opposite John’s mother, self-consciously smoothing his jacket.

‘You look all in,’ she commented. ‘It was a bad night for us all. I know you and John were great pals to each other. He said you used to go swimming, and he told us wherever you went the girls were always chasing after you.’

‘That’s not true,’ Reg shook his head, but he described to them the friendship they’d had, from the night when John first helped him get the dessert trolley out of his bunk. He told them about the hours they spent exploring foreign ports, and the way they looked out for each other on board, and he said he had always hoped to persuade John to help him start his own restaurant one day, the two of them in business as partners.

‘He’d have liked that,’ his mother nodded. ‘I could see him going for that.’

His sister Mary asked, ‘We don’t want to upset you, but would you mind telling us what happened to John after the
Titanic
hit the iceberg? When did you last see him?’

Reg told them about bumping into John on the boat deck about an hour after the collision and their plan to swim to one of the half-empty lifeboats. They’d been scared, but thought they could make it since they were both strong swimmers. ‘We wanted to stick together, but then we were sent on errands and I promised an Irish woman that I would look out for her son, who was missing, and when I got back up on deck I couldn’t see John anywhere. We’d said we’d meet at the captain’s bridge but as far as I could see he wasn’t there. And then the ship started to go under and we had to jump. I don’t know where he was then.’

‘He didn’t make it to any of the lifeboats?’ Reg shook his head sadly.

‘Mary and I were trying to decide this morning whether to go up to Halifax and put up a headstone for him there, among the other crew from the ship, or to have one for him back home in Newcastle. What do you think he would have liked, Reg?’

I think he would have liked to be alive
, Reg thought to himself, but he answered tactfully: ‘Newcastle. Near his family. That’s where he’d want to be – with the living rather than the dead.’

‘Aye, you’re probably right. That’s what we’ll do then.’

Reg explained as well as he could about the way his mind had been working when he gave John’s name on the
Carpathia
and then decided to pretend to be John. He told them about his fear of the water now, which meant he couldn’t return to England even if he wanted to. He described the fogginess in his head and the difficulty he had making any decisions.

‘Your mum must have had a right scare when she saw your name on the list of the dead. Did you manage to get word to her before the lists were published?’ Mary asked.

Reg looked down at his lap and the guilt flooded over him yet again. These weren’t the only people he had hurt with his selfish actions. There were his mother, his brothers, and Florence. His Florence. ‘I sent a telegram the day after we docked but I haven’t written since.’

The women were aghast. ‘She must be worried sick about you.’ They stared at each other and then at him, in open-mouthed disbelief.

‘Do you not get on with her?’ Mary asked.

‘We’re not very close, but it wasn’t that. I couldn’t think what to say because I’m not sure what I’m doing here or how long I’m staying.’

‘All you needed to say was that. She’ll be imagining all sorts.’

He was the most selfish person in the world, he now realised. Everything had been about him and what he wanted, with no thought to those he’d left behind.

‘You have to make amends. You need to write to her, lad.’

‘She’ll never forgive me,’ Reg told them. ‘She’ll hate me.’

‘She might be furious but her anger won’t be as strong as her relief. I’m speaking as a mother myself. You write a letter apologising and trying to explain. She’ll understand, just as we do.’

‘I had a girl back home, called Florence. We’d been stepping out for two years and she hoped we were going to be married. I need to write to her too.’

Mary gave him a withering look. ‘If you have your letters ready soon, we could take them for you. We’re going home on the next ship we can get a place on. We have to tell John’s father, you see. He’s waiting for news.’

Reg clasped his forehead.
Another person he had hurt.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeated. ‘I know it can’t compensate in any way, but I’ve brought you all the money I have.’ He handed it to Mary, who put it on a table without counting it. ‘If you give me your address I’ll send you more every month to cover the cost of your trip.’

The women looked at each other. ‘We talked about it this morning and decided that we’ll take this money from you, if only to make you feel better. We’ll put it towards John’s headstone and get him a fancy one. He’d be happy you’d done that.’

Least you could do, man,
Reg imagined him saying.

‘I can’t explain properly why I did all this,’ he told them, ‘but in a funny way I felt as though the old Reg died on the
Titanic
. I haven’t been myself since then. I’m scared of everything, and I never used to be. Life feels unreal. I’ve missed John so much and I’ve got no friends here, not real friends. I sometimes wish I went down with the ship as well.’

‘Don’t you ever say that again!’ John’s mother was cross with him for the first time that morning. ‘You are young and strong with your whole life ahead of you, and if I hear of you doing anything silly, I will never forgive you. You know what I’m talking about.’ She glared into his eyes. ‘You write your letters, send your money, make your amends, then pick yourself up and start living again.’

As he walked back to Madison Avenue, Reg wondered why John hadn’t been close to his family. They seemed like incredible people to him. How could they forgive what he’d done to them? How could they be kind to him after that? Maybe independent types like him and John needed to break away from their families first before they could look back and appreciate them. Maybe his own mother was a good woman who had struggled to do her best in difficult circumstances after his dad left, and if she never seemed to pay him any attention, it was because she had no energy left after working to feed and clothe them and looking after the younger ones. Maybe he had been uncharitable in his opinion of her.

Back at the house, he wasn’t surprised to find that the story had got around and hardly anyone was speaking to him. Mr Frank asked if everything had gone as well as could be expected at the meeting, and Reg said yes, he thought so. Molly and Alphonse turned their backs when he walked into the kitchen, and the other staff ignored him as well. When he served luncheon to Mr Grayling and Miss Hamilton, he could feel her eyes on him and he suspected she had been told what had happened.

The only thing Mr Grayling said to him was that he was taking legal advice on how to get Reg immigration papers in the correct name. It might take a while to resolve. Reg gave him the surviving fragments of his old passport and thanked him humbly for his trouble.

That afternoon when he had a couple of hours free, he sat down to write to his mum and Florence. ‘Dear Mother,’ he wrote, then stopped. These were going to be the hardest letters he would ever have to write in his life.