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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 couple in the dining saloon, the Howsons, who were a terrible advertisement for the institution. Married less than a year, they were already disappointed in each other. Neither had fulfilled the other’s expectations. Margaret knew them slightly and could see where the fault lines lay. She hated that he gambled or, more particularly, that he gambled and lost. He hated the money she spent on clothes and fripperies. He’d been a bachelor throughout his twenties and had never realised quite how much a new gown cost, nor how many were required to see a fashionable woman through the season. On the Titanic , first-class women would never dare turn up to dinner in a gown they had worn before. Each evening required a lavish new creation.
    There was something more, Margaret mused. They had moved to New York after their marriage and he had hoped to gain immediate acceptance in high society through his wife, who came from a better family. He had no concept that to reach the inner circle of the kind of high-society grandees travelling on the ship would take careful calculation and manoeuvring over at least a year, and even then they might never get there since he worked in property. Being Canadian stood against them as well. They might be endured for the course of the voyage but no new invitations would be delivered to their butler on their return.
    Margaret could view all this from a distance and see the futility of their ambitions and desires in the context of a life. So many other things were more important, but the young could never understand that. To them social position was everything, since a wag had said back in the 1880s that