Will you marry me Maggie Murphy?
Please say yes.
With all my love and affection.
Yours, always
Séamus Doyle
Maggie folded the letters and placed them carefully back into the packet. She rested her head against the back of the seat and let her eyes wander to the dark wood sideboard in the far corner of the room. She scanned the images in the picture frames; a lifetime of marriages, friendships and births catalogued in the pictures displayed within the mismatched assortment of frames. She closed her eyes.
‘Oh Séamus,’ she whispered as the tears fell slowly down her fragile cheeks. ‘My darling Séamus, I miss you. I miss you so, so much.’
*
She wasn’t sure how long she’d slept or what had woken her. She’d dreamt that she was drowning and calling for Séamus to save her. He’d come running and dragged her to the shore. ‘I will always protect you Maggie,’ he’d said. She’d reached out her hand to touch his face and as she sat in the semi-darkness of her sitting room now, she wasn’t sure whether the hand that had touched hers was part of her dream, or reality.
She heard a couple walking past outside laughing, a breeze rattling through the open upstairs window, the clock on the mantelpiece ticking its regular, predictable, unchanging rhythm. She stood up slowly, grabbing the stick she used to steady herself and walked through the house, turning on a few lights here and there.
She knew what she was looking for and bending down slowly, she reached for the small black suitcase under her bed. She wanted to look again through her belongings. She wanted to remember. After a lifetime of forgetting, she now wanted to remember; wanted to remember everything, every last detail. She wanted to celebrate the lives of those she had loved and known so many years ago. She wanted to remember and then she wanted to be at peace. Finally. She wanted the whispers and echoes of that night to fall silently away. She wanted absolution from the years of guilt and doubt she had harboured; the crushing sense of remorse that she had survived amid so much death and destruction.
She knew that sharing her story with Grace, talking about Titanic and all those she’d loved and left in Ballysheen, that by seeing the letters from Séamus was going to help her make some peace with it all. But she knew that there was only one way she was ever going to be finally free from the burden of that ship. She had to go back to where it had all begun; back to Ireland, back to Ballysheen.
*
The following day was the tenth anniversary of Grace’s great-grandfather James’s death. She’d promised to take Maggie to the cemetery to place some fresh flowers in remembrance before they went for their usual Saturday morning cup of tea.
Grace knew that Maggie liked this particular cemetery because of the cherry blossom trees which stood just outside the boundary wall and cast a lovely, pink hue over the place on a day like today.
It was a bright, spring morning and Maggie enjoyed the light breeze on her face as they walked through the cemetery. She noticed the single cloud in the blue sky and sensed the stillness about the place. It reminded her of the day she’d left Ireland. A distant memory flashed through her mind as she walked silently beside her great-granddaughter.
A young girl, dressed smartly in her best calico pinafore, staring out of the small, square windowpanes, past the blossom trees and across the vast expanse of fields and stone walls which divided up the land, the mighty mountain of Nephin Mor cast into shadow by a passing cloud, as if doffing its cap to the departing travellers. Her aunt’s voice, ‘It is time.’ Stones crunching underfoot as she walked from home to home – her cousin Paddy’s white, stone cottage first. Knocking on the door. ‘It’s time,’ she’d called. The same at the Joyce’s home, where she’d imagined Ellen’s emotions torn between a deep worry for the sick mother she was leaving and excitement about seeing her handsome fiancée again who would be awaiting her arrival in New York. More knocking on doors; stones crunching under her black boots until finally reaching the Maddens’, where her friend Peggy was waiting with her new hat and gloves. Walking back towards her own home, her head bowed, her eyes fixed on her feet, her ears listening intently to the crunch, crunch, crunch of the stones. The thump in her heart as she saw him standing under the blossom tree; come to say goodbye.
‘Are you OK Maggie? You seem very quiet today?’
Grace’s voice pulled Maggie from her thoughts. ‘Oh, yes dear. I’m perfectly fine. Just enjoying the peace and quiet. It’s so beautiful here isn’t it. So still and calm. It reminds me of the morning I left home.’