Women and Children First (26 page)

The night following Mr Grayling’s offer of employment, Reg lay in bed wondering what to do. Why had he offered such a thing? Was it really because he felt sorry for Reg as a fellow survivor? Or was he trying to buy his silence? The last thing he wanted was Reg gossiping about his new romance so soon after his wife’s death.
Before it, in fact.
Maybe he wanted to be able to keep an eye on him. ‘Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,’ the saying went.

Reg had formed a distinctly unfavourable impression of Mr Grayling’s character since first encountering him on the
Titanic
. He didn’t want to be under obligation to such a man, and reliant on him for food, shelter and wages. Yet he had agreed he would go to the house on Sunday. He had better go, or else Mr Grayling might complain about him to the restaurant. He could probably get him fired with one telephone call if he took it into his head to do so.

‘Have you ever worked in service?’ he asked Tony on the way to work the next morning.

‘Yeah, for a while.’

‘How is it different from the restaurant trade?’

‘It depends on your boss, but it’s pretty different really. At least with the restaurant we can get back to our own place after work. If you live in, you never get away. You’re at their beck and call day and night.’ He looked suspicious. ‘Why, you’re not thinking about it, are you?’

‘I’ve had an offer,’ Reg admitted. ‘It’s good money, so I’m tempted.’

‘Yeah, but
service
.’ Tony drawled the word contemptuously. ‘It’s one step up from slavery if you ask me. Who’d you get the offer from?’

‘Someone I knew on the
Titanic
. Mr Grayling. He has a house on Madison Avenue. Is that a good address?’

‘You must be kidding. George Grayling, the guy who saved himself and let his wife drown? What a heel! You can’t go there, John. He’s not even one of the Four Hundred so you wouldn’t get to meet all the best people. Sure, he’s got a grand house but it’s like a mausoleum.’

‘I told him I’d visit on Sunday so I’d better go. But thanks for your advice.’

Reg had more or less made up his mind he was going to turn down the offer, but at work on Saturday, a union representative came to the back door of the restaurant for a word with the waiting staff. ‘These goldbricks aren’t even listening,’ he said, referring to the restaurant bosses. ‘They’ve got trainloads of Negroes lined up down South. We have to be ready to walk out for the long haul. The bosses never do any work at all, but they want us to take a pay cut. The only way to beat them is to stick together. Are you with us on this?’

‘Yeah!’ ‘Too right!’ The waiters at Sherry’s were a vociferous crowd.

Reg shrank back, his chest tight with nerves. He’d read in the papers about a mill workers’ strike earlier that year in which a woman was shot and killed. Passions ran high at strikes and Reg wanted to steer well clear. He was an illegal immigrant, after all. He was there under false pretences. What if he got arrested while standing on a picket line with his fellow waiters? He’d be sent to jail then thrown out of the country on his release.

Reg slipped away to the men’s room and locked himself inside a cubicle. He sat on the seat and bent double, hugging his knees. He was sweating and could hardly breathe, while his heart was pounding hard. What’s worse, there was a pain in his chest that was making him feel sick, and he began to worry that he was having a heart attack.
What can I do? What can I do?
He’d started down one particular path on the
Carpathia
when he took John’s name, and now there was no way to get off it again. All he wanted was a calm, quiet situation where he could save some money, keep himself to himself, and gradually, when he felt better, create a better life. This strike seemed to threaten everything. But the alternative was working for Mr Grayling and that seemed scary too.

‘You in there, John?’ Tony banged on the cubicle door. ‘It’s time to get to our stations. Mr Timothy’s looking for you.’

Reg stood up carefully and opened the door.

‘Christ! You feeling all right? You look terrible. Want me to tell Timothy you can’t work tonight?’

‘I’ll be fine. I just need to wash my face. Tell him I’ll be right out.’

Reg splashed cold water on his face and the back of his neck, and gradually he could feel his heartbeat slowing and the deep pain in his chest easing, but still he felt fragile. He wasn’t himself. Somehow he got through the evening shift without incident and hurried home on his own without waiting for Tony. He needed solitude. Why wouldn’t everyone leave him alone?

The following afternoon, he made his way to the Upper East Side and walked along Madison Avenue until he reached the address Mr Grayling had given him. He was over an hour early, so he sat on a bench across the street. The house was a big brown square box, three storeys high and covered in ivy. There were half a dozen steps up to a double doorway lined by pillars. The building sat on a corner and he could see it was three windows deep as well as three windows high. There must be dozens of rooms inside. The shutters were closed on the ground floor but upstairs he caught an occasional sense of movement inside.

At five minutes to three, he stood wearily and walked round to the back of the house, where he found the tradesman’s entrance and rang the bell. It was opened by a tall, skinny man in a chef’s hat.

‘
Ah bonjour!
You are the new footman from the
Titanic
, yes?’

This was obviously the French chef Mr Grayling had mentioned. He had a heavy foreign accent. Reg nodded shyly. ‘Maybe.’

‘You look good. That is a start. Come this way.’

The chef led him through a large, airy kitchen and up some stairs to a hallway, where he introduced him to a man in wire spectacles who seemed to be the butler, a Mr Frank.

‘John Hitchens? I’ve been expecting you. Let me take you upstairs first and show you the room that would be yours, then we can work our way down.’ He smiled in a friendly fashion. ‘Perhaps there will be a cup of coffee on offer when we get to the kitchen.’

Right at the very top of the house, there was a room with a slanted skylight window through which Reg could see clear blue sky. As well as a bed there was a writing desk, an armchair, a wardrobe and a china washbowl.

‘This would be yours,’ Mr Frank explained. ‘You’d share a washroom with Alphonse, the chef, but otherwise you’d have this floor to yourself.’

It was quiet up there, a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of the rooming house where he and Tony lived, a million miles away from the clattering and shouting of the restaurant kitchen.
I could think up here. I could get my head sorted out.

‘You’d have a lot of free time,’ Mr Frank told him. ‘Your duties would be to serve breakfast, luncheon and dinner to Mr Grayling, when he is at home, and occasionally afternoon tea if there is a visitor, but that is very rare. Between times, you could help Alphonse with food preparation, but most days you are likely to have several hours of free time. Would that suit you?’

Reg nodded.
Yes, it would
. ‘And the wages?’

‘Mr Grayling said he agreed that with you. Ten dollars a week, paid every Saturday.’

As he followed Mr Frank down the stairs, Reg wondered what John would think of this place. ‘
It’s a bit dull, man, but think of all that money.
’ Is that what John would have said?

At least I’d be safe here,
Reg thought.
I wouldn’t have to go on strike or get arrested.

Down in the kitchen he was given coffee in a cup with a Japanese pattern painted on it, and a piece of cake. It was good cake: moist and tasty. A girl came in wearing a maid’s uniform. She had reddish-blonde curly hair and a broad smile that showed pretty white teeth.

‘Are you the guy from the
Titanic
?’ she asked. ‘What a shocker that was. I’d be in a hell of a sweat if that was me. I hope you’re going to work here. We need someone new to talk to. It’s easy work. Alphonse and I will look after you. Have you met Alphonse? He’s the big guy with the funny accent. Come on, say you’ll take the job, John. You’ll take it, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Reg said. ‘Yes, I rather think I will.’

‘It appears to be about two carats.’ Lady Mason-Parker eyed the engagement ring. ‘May I have a closer look?’

Juliette slipped it off her finger and handed it over.

‘The clarity is good. No visible flaws. It’s an old-fashioned kind of setting. Did he say if it’s a family ring?’

‘Honestly, Mother, I don’t give a fig about the ring. Surely it’s more important that I am engaged to be married to the man I love and want to spend the rest of my life with?’

‘Well, of course. There is that. You won’t do anything foolish like telling him about your condition with some misguided notion that you should be honest about it? Promise me you won’t.’

‘Of course not. I wish I could, but I can’t risk it.’

The news of the engagement came at just the right moment to revive her mother’s spirits. She was deeply disturbed by newspaper stories about her erstwhile friends, the Duff Gordons, who had been testifying to the British Inquiry into the sinking of the
Titanic
, and who were not coming out of it smelling of roses. They had escaped, along with their maid, in Lifeboat 1. It was smaller than the other boats, but was seriously underfilled with only twelve people on board, including crew. It looked as though the Duff Gordons had personally commandeered it for their own use.

After the ship sank, witnesses claimed Lady Duff Gordon had stopped the crew going back to pick up survivors despite all the space they had and – most damning of all – her husband had paid them the sum of five pounds each in a gesture that seemed calculated to buy their silence. In her testimony, Lady Duff Gordon claimed that she hadn’t heard any cries from those dying in the water after the ship sank, and they both insisted that the money they paid was a mere gesture to help the crew replace their lost kit. The verdict of the press was damning, though.

‘I can’t believe I misjudged them so badly,’ Lady Mason-Parker cried. ‘They seemed such an upright, distinguished couple. I do hope no one of importance saw us together. Since we only took tea in the hotel and went to fashion houses together, surely I won’t be associated with them in the public view?’

‘Our case was completely different from theirs, Mother. We didn’t behave selfishly that night. You have nothing to berate yourself with.’

With a deep sigh, Lady Mason-Parker turned her attention to the more pressing matter of organising a Christmas wedding back in Gloucestershire, to which it seemed virtually the whole county would be invited.

During those final weeks before her departure for Saratoga Springs, Robert came to call every afternoon, and he took Juliette out for dinner each evening. Every second was precious as they talked about the house they would buy in New York (they would stay in his family home until the perfect one was found), the honeymoon they planned (both had a hankering to see the Egyptian Pyramids and perhaps cruise down the Nile) and the American guests who would cross the Atlantic to come to their English wedding. He had applied for a licence for them to marry in secret at City Hall and when it arrived, he made an appointment for an afternoon just four days before she and her mother were leaving for the country.

‘Are you sure you want to do this, my love? I don’t mean to pressure you,’ Robert said gently. ‘The haste is merely born of my insecurity that you might change your mind during our long separation. But as I get to know you better and understand the type of person you are, I see you would not trifle with me.’

Juliette blushed. ‘I understand your reasons, and mine are the same. Let’s get married now so that neither of us has any doubt about the other’s commitment. Leaving you behind would otherwise be unbearable.’

And so it was that at four o’clock on a Monday afternoon in early June, they rode in Robert’s car down to the south of Manhattan, to a domed building with a statue of Justice holding her scales on the very top. A wide set of stairs led up to the entrance, and Juliette felt short of breath as they climbed them, her corset squeezing her inwards so she still had a semblance of a waist in the cornflower blue dress and jacket she wore. The simple ceremony lasted only fifteen minutes before the city clerk pronounced them husband and wife and Robert kissed her full on the lips.

Straight afterwards, they went to the Waldorf Astoria for a glass of champagne in its plush drawing room.

What have I done?
Juliette wondered, feeling light-headed. But she had no regrets when she looked at the wonderful man who sat beside her on a velvet sofa, holding her hand and gazing into her eyes. She wanted the moment to last for ever. She was so much in love with Robert, and so perfectly happy, that she felt she could explode.

‘Shall we dine here?’ Robert asked. ‘The food is rather good.’

‘I’d have to go back to the Plaza to get changed first. I’m not dressed for dinner.’

‘You look wonderful to me,’ he said, ‘but I know how much you women care about wearing the correct style for each occasion.’

She opened her mouth to deny this, then saw that he was teasing her. She’d often told him how ridiculous she found the dictates of social etiquette.

‘I have another suggestion,’ he said quietly. ‘If you don’t want to, that is absolutely fine and I will quite understand, but now that we are married we could legitimately take a room here and have an intimate dinner on our own. Then it wouldn’t matter what you were wearing.’

Juliette blushed deeper than ever and he stroked the pinkness of her cheek, looking deep into her eyes. He was asking her to have marital relations with him. It was his right now. She wanted to be intimate with him, yearned for it in fact, but how could she risk him feeling her swollen belly and guessing her condition? Surely it would be obvious?

‘You’re shy,’ he murmured. ‘It’s only natural. We won’t do anything you don’t want to do, but I would love to get you on your own so that I can give you some proper kisses, husband to wife.’

‘I’d like to … to be with you,’ she said quietly. ‘But I fear you will not like me so much. I’ve … I’ve put on weight recently with all the fine dining and lack of exercise and I am afraid you will find me rather plump. I promise that once I can ride and walk more regularly, I will shed my excess flesh.’

‘I adore your figure,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘You are a woman rather than a spindly creature who looks as though she would break in two.’

He kissed her neck, and Juliette was overcome with such a wave of desire that the decision was made.
I can refuse him nothing,
she thought.
Especially not when he kisses me like that.

He paid for a room and when the door closed behind them they devoured each other with kisses. Any shyness on Juliette’s part, Robert took for female modesty. They slipped under the bedcovers to make love, and afterwards lay wrapped up in each other’s limbs, kissing and talking softly, then making love some more. At one o’clock in the morning, they knew they could linger no longer but must get Juliette back to her hotel or risk arousing Lady Mason-Parker’s suspicions.

‘I never thought a love like this was possible,’ he whispered as he said good night. ‘You have made me the happiest man in the world.’