Maggie didn’t tell him who she was, preferring to remain, as he imagined her to be, nothing more significant than a passing American tourist.
They walked then, through the village. Much had changed; the shops were new, the road was tarmacked and the cars and diesel farm machinery hummed past them, blowing out their choking exhaust fumes. Yet many things were reassuringly unchanged; the pub, the stone bridge, the old school building – albeit now converted into somebody’s home. What struck Maggie most was that there were only two blossom trees standing; park benches and flower beds now in the place where the other trees once stood.
‘But there used to be fourteen,’ she exclaimed. ‘Why ever would they have chopped them all down? They were so beautiful in the springtime.’
She walked to one of the two trees still standing, the blossom finished for the season, the vivid green foliage casting a pleasant shade on the pavement underneath.
‘I’d just like to take a moment,’ she announced, touching the bark of the trunk of one of the trees with her hand, circling it and glancing up through the dappled shade to the branches above. She sighed. And then she noticed an inscription, carved into the wood. MM SD Saying nothing to Grace or Jimmy, she smiled as she recognised her and Séamus’s initials.
‘You romantic old fool,’ she chuckled under her breath.
She agreed to let Jimmy take a photo, as he’d promised to do for their entire trip, to capture the memories for her so that she need never forget or wonder again.
They strolled then up towards the edge of the town, to where the fields began, Maggie walking purposefully towards a derelict stone cottage, almost hidden from view entirely by the mass of long grass and weeds which grew rampant around it, wrapped around the crumbling stones and creeping and twisting through the empty window frames. Jimmy and Grace held back.
‘This was my home,’ she told them as she pushed open a rickety wooden gate which groaned and creaked under the strain as it pushed against the thick, long grass which snaked around it. ‘This is where I lived.’
She stood at what remained of the kitchen window and imagined herself back there on that calm, spring morning as she’d watched Peggy throw the blossom petals onto Maura Brennan’s head, giggling and laughing with excitement about the journey ahead of them. She remembered Maura’s swollen, pregnant stomach and closed her eyes against the memory of her standing on the deck of Titanic, one hand grasping her husband Jack’s, the other placed protectively over her stomach. What a happy life they would have led had things worked out differently.
She could almost feel Kathleen among the broken rubble and gnarled branches; stiff, forthright, practical, confident, Aunt Kathleen, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips as she’d watched Maggie go off to tell the others the carts were ready. She saw her face, the hint of a smile playing across her lips, so much to look forward to, so much to show her niece when they arrived in America. The image faded as a cloud passed overhead, momentarily blocking out the sun and casting the three of them and the house into a cold shadow.
‘We never knew what happened to her that night you know.’ Maggie spoke softly as she pottered around among the remnants of her home. ‘She made sure we were all aware of the danger and knew what we must do - and then we lost her. Gone, without a trace. All sorts of dark thoughts filled my mind as I watched that ship lurch and groan as she broke apart – maybe she was trapped somewhere, maybe she was one of those desperate voices I could hear screaming in the waters around me.’
‘Don’t Maggie,’ Grace said, placing her arm gently around Maggie’s frail shoulders. ‘Don’t think that. She was a very good woman. She’ll be at peace now.’
‘You’d never believe a lovely little home used to stand here would you,’ she said. ‘But it did, and I can see it now if I shut my eyes, every last brick and stone. The kettle hanging over the fire, the smell of oatcakes baking, the warmth from the fire. Ah, it was a grand home. I was very sorry to leave it.’
After leaving her to say a prayer among the stones and weeds, Grace and Jimmy walked with her then to other homes which Maggie wanted to visit. Most of them stood now as her own home did, a blanket of weeds covering everything, obscuring the memories of what used to be and yet, in what appeared as just piles of rubble and weeds to others, Maggie saw memories; saw familiar faces in every crumbled stone, saw smoke rising from the fallen chimneys, heard conversations through the broken doors; laughter and chiding parents through the open windows. Although they were all lost to the ocean, something about the people who had lived in these broken homes endured.