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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.

Chapter Six

     
    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