‘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 tea leaves – although I didn’t always like what they predicted. A piseog we used to call the superstitions like reading the tea leaves 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 tea leaves Maggie, but I can’t promise anything 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.
*
Through the process of unravelling Maggie’s past life, Grace thought more and more about the shoebox under her own bed. It contained the letters Jimmy had written to her after her father died. They were still unopened.
For two years, she had tried to ignore the nagging urge to crawl under the bed, take the rubber-band off the shoebox and tear open the envelopes on the dozen or so letters to see what it was that Jimmy had wanted to say to her. She had also tried to ignore the nagging urge to call him. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him anymore. She did. Completely. She had never stopped loving him. And that was the problem.
Having lost her father, the man she adored with all her heart, it seemed impossible to Grace that she could ever let herself love anyone as much again, the pain was too much to bear when they went away from your life. So she’d stopped herself from loving Jimmy; stopped herself from rushing to the phone to hear the sound of his voice and stopped herself from tearing open the envelopes which were addressed to her in his distinctive handwriting. She’d been stopping herself from doing all this for two years and she was exhausted.
Ever since Maggie had taken her to one side at her twenty-first birthday party and told her about her experiences on Titanic, Grace had started to feel differently about her own life. With every new revelation about Maggie’s life in Ireland and through the words she had written in her journal, Grace felt an increasing sense of purpose, of focus and renewal.
She sat on her bed now, the dusty shoebox in her hands, and imagined how Maggie must have felt sitting in that cart, being taken further and further away from her home and the man she loved; how she must have felt sitting on the narrow bunk bed of the cabin she’d shared with her aunt and her two friends, clutching the packet of letters from Séamus and carefully unwrapping them one day at a time as she sailed further away from him.