The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel

by Hazel Gaynor

  They weren’t there.

  He looked frantically around the room until he saw a distinctive green hat. Relieved, he ran towards the group, hurrying them along, urging them to go with him. He grabbed Maggie by the shoulders. ‘Maggie listen. You’re not going to be able to get up on deck using the stairs. D’you understand? They’re all blocked with people and they’re not letting anyone up at the moment.’

  She looked at him, a wild terror in her eyes. ‘I can’t swim Harry,’ she blurted out in desperation. ‘I can’t swim. I’m afraid of the water.’

  ‘You’re not going to have to Maggie. Listen, d’you remember the ladder? The one I took you up this morning?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Go there now. It’s the only way up. Take your group and I’ll meet you up there. D’you remember the way?’

  Peggy was listening. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘I remember. I’ll take them.’

  ‘I’m going to fetch some others to come up with us,’ Harry continued. ‘I’ll see you on the deck. Wait at the top of the ladder. I know where there’s a lifeboat.’

  Maggie grabbed his arm. ‘Harry, can you take the family sittin’ over there?’ She pointed in the direction of Elsie, the young English girl and her family. ‘They’ve a small baby.’

  ‘OK. I will. Now go, all of you. And hurry. There isn’t much time.’ Seeing them start reaching for their cases and luggage he spoke again. ‘You’ll have to leave the luggage. There’s no room for it and it’s making it difficult for people to move, getting in the way an’ all.’

  Maggie watched as Harry moved over to the English family and spoke quietly to the father.

  Among her own group, there was consternation as they started discussing whether they should leave their cases behind as Harry had said.

  ‘Well, let’s do as the man says,’ Maura Brennan announced in a clipped tone, assuming the role of group leader in Kathleen’s absence. ‘There’s nothin’ in these cases we can’t replace. If it’s my life or my possessions, I know which I’d rather be keepin’. Now come on, all of ye. Let’s at least give ourselves a chance.’

  Reluctantly they walked away from the pile of cases, Ellen Joyce crying more than most at the thought of leaving all her wedding gifts behind. Katie put her arm around her as they walked out of the room. ‘You still have your ring Ellen and your beautiful gold watch. Your fella wouldn’t want you to be fussin’ about linen and lace when we’re in such trouble y’know.’

  Maggie didn’t even notice that she was still clutching her small, black case as she and Peggy led the rest of the Ballysheen travellers out of the dining room and along the long corridor to the crew ladder.

  As Harry had said, it was virtually empty of other passengers. Their route to the decks, and to safety, was clear.

  Kathleen was hemmed in on the stairwell. She couldn’t move up onto the decks because the officers wouldn’t let them and she couldn’t move back down because of the surging mass of people behind her.

  She’d started up the stairwell to help a little boy who’d become separated from his mammy. She came across him in the corridor on the way back to the dining room after she’d realised that the three girls had gone from their cabin. ‘Mammy, Mammy,’ was all he would say, whimpering like a frightened animal, cowering in a corner. There wasn’t a bone in Kathleen Murphy’s body which could leave him where he was. Urging him to tell her where he’d last seen his mammy his tiny finger eventually pointed towards the chaotic stairwell. Taking his hand, Kathleen rushed with him to the stairs. His mother was near the top, calling for him, frantically searching the sea of faces behind her. Kathleen had carried him up to her and was now stuck.

  She was sure she could make out the voice of the steward Harry, asking the officer at the top of the stairwell what was going on. If she hadn’t been a proud woman, she night have considered calling out to him to ask him to tell the others that she would see them up on deck, but she still had her dignity despite the desperate situation and screeching someone’s name like a fishwife was not in Kathleen Murphy’s nature. So she stood among the many others and waited patiently until it was their turn to ascend to the decks and get into the boats.

  It was at that moment that Kathleen heard a gunshot and for the first time in her life she was genuinely terrified and wondered whether she would ever see her niece or the others again.

  CHAPTER 24 - Chicago, 1982

  Grace loved the wildness of the wind, the way it whispered through the barley fields and sent waves of ripples rushing along the rivers and lakes and the clouds hurtling across the sky. To a girl who had spent a childhood outdoors among nature, the wind brought with it a feeling of reckless freedom which reminded her that she was alive; fed her soul with a new energy.

  It was two weeks after her birthday party and a welcome, blustery Saturday afternoon as she drove the short distance from Maggie’s home to the local town. Maggie sat in the passenger seat, commenting, as she always did, on the reckless speed of the other drivers, tutting as they overtook other cars. Grace didn’t notice; didn’t care. She was thinking. For the first time in years, she was really thinking, about her past and about her future. She was excited, purposeful, hopeful.

  As she had since she’d returned home from college two years ago, Grace was taking Maggie out for afternoon tea and cakes. It was a happy arrangement they’d fallen into by chance, calling into a small café on the way back from a trip to the cemetery where Maggie’s late husband was buried. Maggie had announced that she would quite like a cup of tea and ‘The Blossom Tree Café’, pleasantly situated alongside the river and with an enticing, pale pink door, had taken her fancy. The café, as it turned out, served the biggest, most delicious slices of cake and pie imaginable and their Saturday afternoon ritual was born.

  ‘The Blossom Tree Café’ was a quaint, intimate place, simple in its cottage kitchen design but clean and well looked-after. The owner was a very friendly, terrifically overweight woman called Beth whose raucous laughter could often be heard coming from the kitchen. She always insisted that Maggie was taken especially good care of. She said Maggie reminded her of her own Grandma and that it was nice to see the old lady walking through the door every week.

  Maggie, of course, loved all the fuss and attention and particularly liked the white, linen tablecloths with the little vases of pink and white daisies dotted about the place. She said it looked elegant and refined; like a little café she had once seen a very long time ago.

  Parking in their usual space just outside the entrance, Grace helped Maggie out of the car, the two of them giggling as the wind whipped around their hair and tugged at their coats. They entered the café in a breeze which blew all the menus over on the tables, and found their favourite spot near the window.

  Grace helped Maggie to take off her coat as she settled herself into the comfortable, shaker-style chair. The waitress brought over two slices of Mississippi Mud Pie and a pot of tea for two; their usual order.

  ‘Jesus Grace, would you look at that,’ Maggie chuckled. ‘There’s tea and cake for two and I haven’t even gotten my ass into my seat!’

  Grace laughed. She loved hearing the Irish lilt in Maggie’s voice, mixed up with her American accent; loved to catch the occasional phrase or remark which could only have come from her Irish heritage.

  ‘So Maggie,’ Grace enquired, sinking her fork into the crunchy, chocolate biscuit base. ‘I’ve been dying to ask you something.’

  Maggie considered her great-granddaughter from behind her china teacup, the short burst of fresh air having given a lovely radiance to her usually pale cheeks. ‘Yes dear? What is it?’

  ‘Well, I’ve been wondering why you decided to tell me all about Titanic and everything now? Y’know, after all these years? Did you really never tell mom or Grandma, or anyone else in the family?’

  Maggie sighed, staring into Grace’s warm, chestnut eyes. They had looked so dull in recent years, but seemed to have got a little of their spark back recently, a fact whic
h pleased her. ‘Well Grace, d’you know something, I’m not altogether sure why I told you. Maybe it was watching you turn twenty one. Birthdays can do that to old folk like me y’know – turn you all nostalgic and make you realise you’ve been lucky to see another year’s worth of birthdays. I guess I started thinking on the fact that I might not be around for very much longer and then nobody would ever know.’ She took a sip of her tea and broke into her own slice of pie. ‘Would they?’

  ‘But you must have told great-granddad James?’

  ‘Oh, yes dear. Of course.’ She paused, as she often did when he spoke about her late husband, momentarily lost in her own private thoughts of a man she had clearly adored and missed terribly. ‘But, y’know Grace,’ she continued, ‘as terrible as Titanic was, as the years passed, people stopped talking about it. You see we had the wars then and people started talking about them instead, and then Armstrong went to the moon and Kennedy was shot and all kinds of things happened which were more important than a ship sinking in the Atlantic ocean.’

  She took another bite of cake, taking her time to savour it and commenting enthusiastically on how delicious it was before continuing. ‘Do you know, almost sixty thousand American soldiers died in Vietnam. It kind of makes the fifteen hundred who died on Titanic seem like a little boating accident in comparison.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. People move on, history moves on and there will, sadly, always be something more terrible waiting around the corner.’ She paused to brush a crumb from her mouth.

  ‘But people have always been interested in Titanic,’ Grace remarked, motioning to the waitress that they’d like more milk. ‘I mean, I knew all about it and it always comes up in history lessons at school.’

  ‘Ah, yes dear. I know that. But for those of us who survived, it was easy enough to be forgotten about after a few years. Your great-grandfather and I sometimes talked about it – especially on the anniversary - but as far as anyone else was concerned, who could have guessed that I was on that ship? I certainly never wanted to talk about it again after all those press people in New York and after telling my aunt Mary everything when I eventually got to Chicago. I had to tell her you see; had to go through the whole thing. Terrible thoughts go through your head you know – with them poor souls being at the bottom of the ocean and……’

  Grace took hold of Maggie’s hand. ‘Don’t Maggie. Don’t think it.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Maggie continued, ‘I suppose since your great-grandfather died I haven’t spoken about Titanic at all and with me not getting any younger and watching you blowing out your birthday candles, it struck me that in years to come my great-great-grandchildren would know nothing about their great-great-grandma’s involvement in the whole terrible event.’

  Grace poured more tea into both their cups. Neither of them noticed the breeze which filled the room as other customers came in. They both sipped their tea for a while and finished their slices of cake. ‘And which great-great-grandchildren might these be anyway?’ Grace asked, smiling and hoping to lighten the mood a little. ‘You and Nana and Mom might have all had kids before you were barely in your twenties, but I’m certainly not planning on having any babies until I’m at least forty!’

  ‘Exactly,’ Maggie replied. ‘And there’s not much chance of me being around for that now is there. So, I figured I would tell you now while I still have my senses straight and you wouldn’t be whisking me off to that institution in Fairfield thinking I’d turned crazy in my old age.’ She winked at Grace and reached for her other hand. ‘As my aunt Kathleen used to say, ‘time is a great story teller’. I guess she was right.’

  They paused in their conversation for a moment as the waitress came over to check that everything was OK for them. It seemed to Grace to be a strange conversation to be having, sitting here in this small, inconspicuous little café. What would the people around them think if they knew Maggie’s background?

  ‘Grace, the Titanic had a very big impact on my life, but I sometimes think that even if it hadn’t sunk, the fact that I was leaving my home and so many people I loved, would have changed me forever anyway. As it turned out, I got lucky. I got off that boat and carried on with my life. I married a wonderful man and we spent many, very happy years together. We had three wonderful kids, plenty of grand kids and even a couple of great-grandkids. I really can’t complain now, can I?’

  Grace absent-mindedly prodded at the few remaining crumbs of cake on her plate. ‘You’ve certainly lived a very happy life Maggie, haven’t you? Despite Titanic.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Maggie looked at Grace, her hands shaking slightly, as they always did, as she brought her teacup to her mouth. ‘I’ve lived a very happy life because of Titanic. Life is fragile Grace – it is no more than a petal of cherry blossom; thriving and in full bloom one minute and blown to the ground by a sudden gust of wind the next. We shouldn’t take our life for granted and we should do whatever we can to make ourselves happy.’ She paused then for a moment, remembering something privately, a small smile playing at the corners of her mouth. ‘Are you happy Grace? Really?’

  Grace refilled their teacups, using the opportunity to think a little before responding. She loved the way Maggie was always able to tell how she was feeling – she’d missed this from her father and was glad to have Maggie there to take his place. ‘I guess not. Not really. But,’ she continued, squeezing the old woman’s almost diaphanous hand, ‘I will be. I will be happy. Your whole Titanic revelation, and especially the way you wrote in your journal about your love for Séamus, has really made me think over the last couple of weeks. I want to feel love like that Maggie – and I did once. With Jimmy. So, I’ve decided to try and get in touch with him again. God only knows whether he’ll want to hear from me. I doubt it, given how badly I treated him. But I guess I can only try. And,’ she continued, feeling that she needed to say all these things now before she changed her mind, ‘I’m going to send the article I’ve written about your Titanic story to my old tutor, Professor Andrews. I want to see whether he thinks it might be good enough to approach that editor at the Tribune again. I don’t really rate my chances, but, well…’

  ‘I guess you can only try,’ Maggie interjected.

  ‘Yeah.’ Grace smiled. ‘Exactly.’

  Maggie said nothing for a while, finishing every last mouthful of her pie and draining the last drop of tea. ‘Well I’m very glad to hear that Grace. It might seem right now that you’ll never be able to get your life back on track after everything you’ve gone through, but it will happen. Lord knows it took me plenty of years to feel like I’d really gotten off that ship – I sometimes feel I’m still on it, even now. As my own Mammy used to say, God rest her soul, ‘on an unknown path, every foot is slow’. Take your time Grace. Take one step at a time.’

  Grace stood up and walked around the small, circular table. She threw her arms around this dear old lady, who was always so wise and so certain, hugging her frail body gently. ‘Thank you Maggie. Thank you – for everything. For confiding your story in me and for making me realise that it’s never too late.’

  ‘I didn’t make you realise any such thing. You realised it yourself – you just needed an old woman with a bit of a story to help you on your way.’

  Maggie picked up her empty teacup, staring into it as she turned it around in her hands. ‘You know, I think it’s a shame they use teabags nowadays,’ she remarked. ‘I quite liked the notion of reading the tealeaves – although I didn’t always like what they predicted. A piseog we used to call the superstitions like reading the tealeaves and hearing the banshee – and of course you know all about those silly little Leprechauns.’ She chuckled to herself. ‘Perhaps we could get some proper tea leaves in the store before we go home and I’ll teach you how to read the leaves – a bit of an Irish tradition for you to pass on to those kids you’re gonna have one day.’

  Grace laughed. ‘Well, I’ll get you the tealeaves Maggie, but I can’t promise a
nything on the kids I’m afraid.’

  CHAPTER 25

  Grace was well aware of the fact that Maggie’s story had given her the perfect way to resurrect her neglected journalism career. This was gold-dust. Stories like this probably came around once in a lifetime and the fact that a Titanic survivor had been discovered would, Grace had no doubt, be pounced upon by the media. This could be more than a break into an apprenticeship with a notoriously difficult features editor, it could really put Grace Butler’s name on the map.

  But aside from the indisputable strength of the story, Grace sensed that there was more to this for both her and Maggie. The more she read about Maggie’s love for Séamus and the more Maggie told her about the packet of letters she had lost the night Titanic sank and about the steward who’d helped her, and about Peggy and Katie and her aunt Kathleen – in fact all those she had travelled with – the more Grace wanted to know about what had become of them all; the letters included.

  Grace didn’t know much about Maggie’s life – it had never really occurred to her to ask. In a way, she supposed she had taken her for granted; this frail old lady who everyone fussed over at Thanksgiving dinners and other family gatherings. She was simply Great Nana Maggie. Who she had been before that title was placed upon her, Grace didn’t know – and now she wanted to. So she continued to read the newspaper clippings, some of which were dated some months after Titanic sank, and she continued to read Maggie’s journal which she had started writing again from the hospital she was taken to in New York after being rescued. For three days and nights, Grace immersed herself totally in Maggie’s life, editing and perfecting the article on her electronic typewriter until she was finally happy with it. Only then did she breathe a sigh of relief, which felt like two years’ worth of sighs, and went to skim stones on the lake, feeling a lightness about her which she hadn’t felt for a considerable time.