The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel (10 page)

‘
Are you sure it’s a
black
case I’m looking for?’ Grace shouted down the small hole in the attic floor which she had clambered up earlier that morning. ‘I can’t seem to find it anywhere.’ As much as she wanted to find the case, it was getting hot and claustrophobic in the attic and Grace was thirsty.

She could hear her great-grandmother pottering about in the kitchen underneath, teaspoons clattering on teacups, the biscuit tin being opened. She imagined her placing one of her paper doilies carefully onto a china plate, arranging the biscuits in a perfect, over-lapping circle. It was a ‘thing’ of Maggie’s, her biscuit display, an almost unreasonable amount of detail being paid to a seemingly trivial activity. But Maggie took pride in many things in life and providing her guests with a nice pot of tea and a plate of uniformly arranged biscuits on a china plate was one of them.

‘
Yes dear,’ she shouted back up, the projection of her voice causing her to cough slightly. ‘A small black case. About the size of a pillow. It’s probably near the back. Underneath a load of your great-grandfather’s old junk.’

You don’t say.

Just as she was about to give up and go down the stepladder for a tea break, Grace saw the slightest glimpse of a solid, black corner jutting out between two fallen boxes. She clambered over to it, the ache in her stooped back and the pain in her knees suddenly forgotten. Her heart raced as she pushed and heaved the heavy boxes to one side and grabbing the edge, pulled the small, black case, out onto the bare floorboards. It was about the size of a pillow.

The hairs stood up on the back of her neck, she could hear the blood rushing through her ears, and her heart hammered in her chest.
Yes
she thought
Yes. This is it!
She swept her fingers across the top of the case, sending a shower of dust particles whirling and spinning into the air around her, blurring her vision temporarily and causing her to cough.

As the dust settled, she saw what she had been searching for. A luggage label bearing the name
Maggie Murphy
and an address of
North Ashland Avenue, Chicago

‘
I have it Maggie,’ she called, coughing again in the dust, ‘I’ve found it!’ Her voice was shrill with excitement. Her great-grandmother didn’t respond. ‘I’m coming down, you can pour the tea.’

Maggie placed the case carefully on her lap. She sat for a moment, closing her eyes, lost in the distant memories of her life. The small clock on the mantelpiece struck eleven o’clock, a bird sang from the old blackberry bush in the garden, a fly buzzed annoyingly in the hallway and particles of dust danced in the shaft of sunlight streaming in through the window. Nothing else moved for those few, quiet moments. Grace hardly dare breathe.

‘
I shouldn’t have gone back for it really,’ Maggie said softly, rubbing her hand across the top of the case. ‘It’s a bit silly now when I think about it, a ship sinking and me going back for a coat and a suitcase. We didn’t realise how bad it was though you see Grace; we didn’t think she would go down.’ She sat silently again then as she prepared herself to face her past.

‘
Do you remember what’s in it Maggie?’

Her great-grandmother looked at her; a softness, a sadness in her eyes. ‘I do Grace. I do. Even after all these years.’

Grace watched quietly as Maggie fiddled with the rusted fastenings, her frail hands shaking more than usual. Those few moments, with the latches grating and groaning but refusing to open, felt like hours. That small, black case seemed, at that moment, like a barrier; a dam against which a deluge of memories had strained for decades and which now threatened to engulf her great-grandmother as soon as it released its secrets and revealed its history.

‘
Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?’ Grace asked tentatively, afraid that opening this case may have a bigger impact on their lives than either of them had at first thought.

Maggie looked at her. ‘No, I’m not sure at all. But we’re here now aren’t we and I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly not going to put that case back up in that stuffy old attic without seeing what’s inside.’

Finally, the fastenings clicked open. Gently, Maggie lifted the lid, emitting a tiny, barely audible gasp as her eyes settled on the contents inside.

It was a moment Grace would never forget, watching this dignified old lady who she loved so much, as she stared into a small case which she’d last seen when only a child. A lifetime of memories flooded her lined face; a lifetime of forgetting washed away in that silent moment in an ordinary sitting room in an average house in a quiet, Chicago suburb.

Maggie lifted her head, resting it against the back of the chair, a sense of release washing over her, the dreadful burden of carrying this secret for all these years seeming to lift from her small shoulders.

Grace sat quietly in the seat opposite, rubbing her fingers over the rough, plum-coloured fabric of the chair, digging her nails into the edges of the intricate pattern, just as she had done since she could first remember coming to this house as a small child. She almost felt uncomfortable now, as if she were intruding in a very private moment. Watching Maggie now, the magnitude of her story hit her fully for the first time.
She had been on Titanic
. She had watched the people she loved drown in an icy sea. She had heard the screams and terror of a thousand voices and had lost everything except for the contents of that small, insignificant case and the clothes on her back. It struck Grace that this was no longer about a story to reignite her journalism career; this was real life, and she was watching it happen in front of her very eyes.

From the case, Maggie began to lift out the items, caressing and studying each one as if it were the most precious of treasures. A simple steel hair comb, a handled-mirror, an emerald coloured brooch, a pair of black, cotton gloves, a bible, a set of rosary beads and a bottle of holy water, a green Third Class Health Inspection Certificate, a menu card, a small book and a bundle of what looked like newspaper clippings. Memories flashed across Maggie’s mind, each item promoting a remembered conversation, a place or a person.

She held her Titanic boarding ticket for a good while, rubbing gently at the fragile paper with her fingers. She closed her eyes and was immediately transported back to the clattering hooves of the horses as they rode into the streets
of Castlebar. She remembered walking into Mr Durcan’s office on Main Street to collect their tickets. She recalled Tom Durcan as a stout, middle-aged man with a whiskery moustache and small, shifty eyes. He’d smiled at her and winked as he handed the tickets to her aunt. ‘She’s a beauty,’ he’d whispered to her. ‘Forty tonne of potatoes on board, they say, and no less than forty thousand eggs. Ye certainly won’t be starvin’ that’s for sure.’ Her eyes had widened at the sheer thought of that many eggs and she’d said something about looking forward to being among the first to sail on the ship before her aunt had bustled her out of the office saying if they stood around chattering all morning, Titanic would sail without them and then they wouldn’t be eating a one of those eggs, let alone forty thousand. She remembered herself and Peggy admiring their tickets with the impressive picture of Titanic on the front. They’d been excited to note that their tickets were sequential in number, hers being 330923 and Peggy’s being 330924. How inconsequential that ticket number had turned out to be.

‘
Not much really is it, to start a new life,’ Maggie said now, turning the items over in her hands. ‘Not much at all. Of course, the rest of my things were in my aunt’s larger case, and we know where that is now. We kept the suitcases under the bunk beds but I kept my personal possessions in here you know, for safe-keeping. I kept this case at the bottom of my bed with my coat. The letters were in my coat pocket. It’s a shame I didn’t keep them in here I suppose.’

Grace moved over to her and knelt down at her side, placing a hand on hers. ‘Do you mind if I look?’

‘
Of course not. It’s all of no use to me now is it?’

Grace studied everything carefully, asking Maggie about the story behind each item, and unwrapping the bundle of newspaper clippings. It was an archivists dream. ‘Oh my goodness Maggie, this is amazing. These are actual newspapers from the time. Look,
The Chicago Tribune, 18
^th
April 1912.’
They sat for a while then, poring over the fragile, yellowed newspapers.

‘
It was the nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York,’ Maggie explained. ‘They’d kept all the newspapers to follow the story. Of course, the papers got it all wrong at first you know, reporting that Titanic was sailing back to Belfast for repairs. Look.’ She pointed to a headline on one of the papers, reading it out loud. ‘
Repair Problem. As far as the company know, Belfast is the only place which possesses a dock of sufficient dimensions’
. And look at this one ‘
Titanic Sunk. No lives lost. Collision with an iceberg. Largest ship in the world. All passengers taken off.’
They didn’t know we were all drowning you see.’ She paused for a moment as they studied some more of the incredible newspaper headlines. ‘One of the nurses gave all these to me when I left the hospital,’ Maggie continued. ‘She said I might want to keep them. She said that Titanic would still be talked about in a hundred years’ time. I thought she was joking.’

She paused then as she handed a small, black notebook to Grace. ‘I used to fancy myself as a bit of a writer too you know.’

‘
What is it?’ Grace asked, turning the book over in her hands and flicking through the pages.

‘
It’s my journal. I started to write it the night we got to Queenstown. I thought I might like to show it to my aunt Mary when we arrived in Chicago; thought I might sit with my children one day and tell them all about the fantastic ship I had sailed to America on. I was writing my last entry when we hit the iceberg. You can even see the shudder in my handwriting. Look.’

Maggie pointed to the last written page, about half-way through the book. There was, indeed, a definite jerk in the handwriting, followed by the words
the ship is shaking, maybe we are slowing down.

‘
Maggie, this is incredible. I just can’t take it all in. How do you feel seeing all these things again now?’

Maggie sat and thought for a moment.

‘
D’you know something, I thought I would feel sadness. But I don’t. I think I finished with all my sadness a long time ago. Now? Now, I guess I feel comforted. I feel at peace.’

‘
I’m glad Maggie. So glad. I was terribly afraid this would all be far too upsetting for you.’ Grace stood up then to stretch her legs and walked over to the window. She liked to watch the birds which always flocked to the feeders and nesting boxes dotted around Maggie’s garden. ‘What were the letters you mentioned by the way?’

‘
Ah, now that’s a different matter altogether. That does make me feel a little sad.’

‘
Why? What were they?’

Maggie laughed to herself. ‘They were from my boyfriend. I left him in Ireland. He wasn’t so good with his words but he gave me a packet of letters the morning I left our village. I remember him saying it would mean I didn’t have to wait on any deliveries; that I could read a letter from him whenever I wanted to. He’d put fourteen letters in, one for each month we’d known each other. I’d only read one or two of them. I thought I should wait until I reached America to read the rest, thinking that I might read one a month as if he’d actually just sent it to me. That way I could be reminded of him whenever I was missing him the most.’ She paused then, remembering him; his gentle manner, his soft eyes, his beautiful red hair. ‘We used to meet under a blossom tree after market on a Wednesday morning. It was a nice arrangement.’ She smiled to herself.

‘
So, what happened to the letters?’

‘
I lost them all that night Grace. They were in my coat you see, and I have no idea what happened to it. I had it on when I got into the lifeboat and it was gone when I left the hospital. I seem to remember a well-to-do lady who was on the lifeboat with me giving me her overcoat because I was shivering so much with the cold. She was an actress – Vera or Violet or something; I can’t remember her name now. I often wondered whether my coat was mistakenly returned to her along with her own, or maybe it was just lost somewhere in the hospital. It was all so confusing you know, trying to track people down, trying to find out if they had survived or gone down with the ship. I’m sure nobody paid much attention to a simple black coat. I’ve often wondered what those other letters said. It would be nice to know.’

Grace waited for a moment, before asking, ‘And did you ever write to him again? You know, afterwards?’

‘
Yes, I did. Once or twice. He only wrote back once though.’ A gentle smile crossed Maggie’s lips as she remembered him, but Grace sensed that she didn’t to want to dwell on this.

‘
And did you never go back to Ireland?’

‘
No Grace. No, I didn’t.’ Maggie spoke quietly, as though this were the hardest thing to say. ‘I never wanted to set foot on a ship again after that terrible night. And I felt so guilty you know. Why had I survived when so many others, even tiny little babies, had died? I knew I could never go back home, knowing the sadness there would be there and knowing that I escaped with my life while I had watched so many others die.’ She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. ‘I was sailing to America to start a new life, and in a funny way, that was the only way I could carry on after Titanic; with a new life. The girl who had left Ireland was gone to the bottom of the ocean with the rest of them. I had to start over. Start again, and that meant never talking about Titanic again. Not with my own family and not with those we had left in Ireland.’