Читать книгу Women and Children First: Bravery, love and fate: the untold story of the doomed Titanic - Gill Paul, Gill Paul - Страница 6

Reg’s hands were shaking so hard he couldn’t hold the newspaper still enough to read. He sat on a bunk and smoothed the pages open on the shabby grey blanket, ironing the creases with his hand. Lists of names in tiny type covered the surface, organised into uneven columns of surnames, forenames, the class in which each person had travelled, and finally their country of origin.

Straight away he saw an error: Luigi Gatti was listed as Spanish rather than Italian. How could he trust this list if they could make such a simple mistake? Was anything in it reliable? Abbing, Abbott, Abelson … Ernest Abbott. That must be Ernie who worked in the mess, but they had him down as a third-class passenger. Poor old Ernie.

His finger scrolled down the page. There was Colonel Astor, with the same number of words by his name as anyone else. All that money couldn’t buy him a place on the other, shorter list, the list of survivors. There was Bill, who had slept in the next bunk, and Ethel from the pantry, the one they called Fat Ethel. If only they’d been kinder …

A couple of columns across, at the ‘J’s, his stomach turned over and his heart began pounding hard. It was a most peculiar feeling to see yourself listed as dead. He looked away and refocused his eyes just outside the window where he could see unfurling buds on the topmost branches of a linden tree. Someone was moving around in a greystone office building opposite. He couldn’t make out if it was a man or a woman, but they were holding some papers, which they put down then disappeared from view. For a few minutes he breathed quietly, keeping his head empty, until he felt able to look at the newspaper again.

The first name that appeared before his eyes was ‘Grayling, Margaret, 1st class, American’, and his eyes filled with tears for the generous old woman who had been his favourite passenger. Not even that old: she was probably only in her forties, about the same age as his mum. Then into his head came the peculiar scene he had witnessed between her husband and a striking young girl on the boat deck. Everything in his mind was now divided into ‘before’ and ‘after’, and that had been before: exactly forty-eight hours before the unthinkable happened.