The Girl Who Came Home(24)
The man with the Uilleann pipes stood next to me for a good while, neither of us spoke. ‘She’s a mighty fine land,’ he said eventually, ‘you should be very proud to have known her, wherever life might take you.’
I turned to him. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Yes, I am. Very proud indeed.’ I remember feeling for the precious packet of letters in my coat pocket, still bound by their packaging and string. Grasping them and my rosary beads, I said a silent prayer.
Titanic followed the coastline of Ireland for the rest of the afternoon, past Old Kinsale Head and on, following the cliffs and the mountains. We returned to our cabins now and again, coming back up to the deck occasionally to catch a last glimpse of our country. The sun was setting as the boat turned to head out across the ocean and we were silent once again as Ireland’s coastline faded into the sea mist and was obscured from view.
PART II
Jules E. Brutalom 31 East 27th St Nyk: 'Safe picked up by Carpathia don't worry.’ Dorothy.Gibson
Marconigram sent from Miss Dorothy Gibson, Carpathia to Julie [Brutalom, Jules E] on 18th April 1912
CHAPTER 9 - Chicago, 1982
In a dimly lit, dusty attic in her great-grandmother’s house, Grace rummaged among cardboard boxes and plastic bags, moving things to one side only to discover yet more boxes hidden behind the first layer. Nothing was labelled; there was no sense of organisation. In fact, there was a distinct sense of disorganisation. She leant back on her heels, sighed and placed her hands on her hips, glancing from one end of the attic to the other. It stretched across the length of the house and was littered with unwanted junk accumulated over the course of a lifetime.
She’d already been looking for over an hour and still the small, black case she was looking for would not reveal itself. This is impossible she thought to herself, jumping at the sensation of a cobweb brushing against her arm. Maybe, after all these years, this case doesn’t want to be found.
Since the night of her birthday party a week ago, Grace had been unable to think about anything other than her great-grandmother’s revelation about Titanic. It was almost unbelievable to think that, for seventy years, she had told nobody other than her husband. Not a soul. Not her children or her grandchildren, nobody. It was astonishing to Grace to think that somebody could keep something like that a secret for so long; everyone knew about the ironic tragedy of the unsinkable Titanic, everyone wondered what it must have been like to have sailed on that ostentatious ship and to have experienced the terror that occurred four days into the voyage across the Atlantic. She remembered doing a school project about the disaster when she was nine years old, remembered the faces of the strange, ghostly-looking people in the black and white photographs of old newspaper articles. She remembered the childish pictures she had drawn of the disaster herself; a big, black ship with one of the funnels broken and a small hole in one side. She wasn’t good at drawing people, so there weren’t any in her picture. It had never occurred to her to ask whether anyone in her own family had actually been involved.
When Maggie had told her the entire, incredible story, had explained her unbearable sadness and her inability to accept what had happened, Grace began to understand why a person would want to completely eradicate something so traumatic from their life. ‘Why would God have spared me,’ she’d said, ‘an insignificant young girl from Ireland, when so many others drowned?’
If it was never spoken about again during her lifetime, perhaps she would be able to distance herself from the legacy of Titanic and observe it, as thousands of people all over the world did, as a mildly interested passer-by in an event which was fascinating in its telling and tragic in its reality. Maybe then she would be able to forget that she was actually one of the thousands of victims.
‘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 (which she insisted on calling them out of loyalty to her Irish roots) 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.