The Girl Who Came Home - a Titanic Novel (33 page)

Edgar Selznick

Éclair Studios

Municipal Buildings

Main Street

Fort Lee, New Jersey

My dearest Edgar,

Apologies for my recent lack of communication – as you will be aware from the many radio and press interviews I have been giving recently, I was one of the many unfortunate victims of the Titanic disaster. Really Edgar, it was the most frightful business altogether – the stuff of nightmares. Mother is overcome with grief at the tragic loss of darling Robert and the ruination of all the wedding plans. I am wracked with guilt about deserting him on the deck of the ship, but what was I to do with the Officers insisting that the women and children fill the boats first – I had to go without him, he was quite insistent and those poorly educated steerage people caused such an unnecessary panic and stampede it was almost impossible to hear ones-self think, never mind pay any heed to one’s own survival, or to one’s fiancée’s survival.

So, I found myself in the lifeboat with little Edmund, being lowered into the Atlantic before I really had much time to think about it.

Thank goodness for the First Class Stewards for encouraging us to dress warmly or I think I may have frozen to death in the lifeboat waiting for rescue. I actually gave one of my topcoats to a wretch of a girl who sat shivering in a thin nightdress and light cotton coat which was drenched to the waist with seawater. I can only assume she was from steerage class – she was lucky, I don’t think many of them survived.

I suspect I will never see the coat again and I suspect it will be the nicest coat that she will ever own - it was from an exquisite little boutique in Rome. I quite liked it, but I suppose it was put to good use.

Well Edgar, now that Robert is buried and I have had chance to grieve and rest and recover my spirits a little, I have been wondering if the studio might be considering making a movie about the Titanic disaster. It would make for great drama and I would be willing to play a lead role, showing from first-hand knowledge what really happened that night. Perhaps Mr Francis might make a suitable Captain Smith and Mr Adolfi for the part of a crewman. With all the inquests and inquiries and haranguing of poor Mr Ismay, I am sure it would be welcomed by the White Star Line and might serve to put some of the more unpleasant rumours about the incident to rest.

In any event, I have arranged for the white silk evening gown I wore that night to be freshly laundered as I thought it might be a nice touch to wear the very same gown in the re-enactment if the studio was enthusiastic about the idea – we could perhaps print the information about the gown on the studio posters.

I look forward to a prompt reply and perhaps we could make arrangements to talk further over lunch. I am in desperate need of some stimulating conversation and I think you may be the only person in this entire city who is capable of providing it!

Yours affectionately,

Vivienne Walker-Brown

CHAPTER
34 - Chicago, 1982

‘
You must be Mr Lockey,’ Grace asked nervously, extending her hand.

She wasn’t used to making arrangements to meet total strangers in coffee shops, but there was something about this man’s face which reassured her. He was taller than she’d imagined and his soft, white hair had been left a little longer than most men of his age she had encountered. It made him look slightly hippyish. While he was obviously in his sixties or possibly seventies, his face was youthful and there was a wonderful sparkle in his eyes. He was smartly dressed in a collared shirt and navy blazer and a fresh scent of cologne added to the sense of good grooming and air of dignity. She immediately relaxed.

‘
Yes, indeed. And you must be the famous Grace Butler,’ he replied, shaking her hand warmly and smiling broadly. ‘I’m delighted to meet you – I so admired your article.’

Grace felt herself blush a little and she giggled as she spoke. ‘Well, hardly ‘the famous Grace Butler’, but yeah, that’s me.’

They stood a little awkwardly for a few seconds, Grace twirling her long hair around her fingers as she was prone to doing when she wasn’t quite sure what to do next, before he gestured for them both to sit down at the table he had taken towards the back of the coffee shop. It was a good choice, in a relatively quiet corner where they could have a conversation without the constant interruption of coffee orders being shouted over their heads.

‘
So,’ he began after ordering them both a flat white. ‘How very strange is this?!’

‘
Erm, very,’ Grace replied, laughing and reaching into her bag for her notepad and pen. ‘I wasn’t even sure you’d turn up. My mom was convinced you would be one of those wierdos who lure young women away from home. She’s sitting outside in the car y’know, waiting for me. How embarrassing!’

He chuckled. ‘Well, hopefully you’re convinced I’m not a ‘wierdo’ – I’ve been accused of worse over the years! Aha,’ he added, motioning towards her writing materials. ‘I see your journalistic instincts follow you everywhere.’

‘
Oh, these? Yeah! Force of habit I’m afraid. Don’t worry, I’m not planning to record our conversation. I just like to have a pen and paper handy to jot things down.’

There was another silence then, each wondering how to broach the subject of the letters. Grace didn’t want to appear rude and demand to see them straight away, but she felt as though she would burst if he didn’t say something soon. Sensing her impatience, the man lifted a small brown paper bag onto the table.

‘
Well, here they are anyway,’ he continued. ‘The coat and the packet of letters. Go ahead, take a look. I hope they’re what you’re looking for.’

Grace lifted the bag carefully from the table, surprised at how much her hands were shaking, and placed it on her lap. She peered inside for a moment before lifting out a small, threadbare black overcoat and a relatively small packet of brown paper tied with a fraying piece of string. They were just as Maggie had described them to her. She could hardly believe what she was seeing. ‘Oh, wow,’ she whispered to herself, surveying the fragile packet, turning it over and over in her hands and brushing the smooth cotton of the coat with her fingertips.

He gave her a few moments to look over the items, smiling at her delight. ‘Is it them?’ he ventured after a while.

‘
I really think it is, yes. They’re just as my great-grandmother described them to me. It’s amazing. They’re so old. I can’t believe they’ve survived all this time.’

‘
Well, my great uncle was a bit of a hoarder by all accounts. There is also this,’ he continued, passing Grace another piece of paper. ‘It’s a letter he wrote to go with the items. It explains how he came about them and what he wanted to be done with them.’

Grace took the envelope from him.

‘
Go on, open it. I hope you don’t mind but I’ve read it – I had to, you see, to check whether there were any specific instructions. It’s fascinating stuff.’

Grace took the piece of paper and unfolded it. Staring at the wonderfully old-fashioned script on the page she started to read.

April 28
^th
, 1912

This coat and packet of letters belong to a Miss Maggie Murphy. She is a seventeen-year-old girl who travelled with her aunt and several others from a town in Ireland. They boarded Titanic at Queenstown in County Cork and I was their dining saloon steward. I got to know the girl Maggie, and some of the others she was travelling with, and had arranged for a Marconigram message to be sent from the ship from Maggie to her sweetheart back in Ireland.

When Titanic sank on the night of April 15
^th
after hitting an iceberg, Maggie was rescued in lifeboat 16, which I was commanded to man by one of the ship’s officers. We were rescued by the steam ship Carpathia at dawn the following morning after eight hours drifting in the freezing cold. Maggie was suffering terribly and was lifted out of the lifeboat onto Carpathia barely conscious.

She had been given lend of a coat by one of the other passengers in the lifeboat; a yank actress, Vivienne Walker-Brown, as Maggie’s own coat was damp with the water and was making her shiver.

When the Carpathia arrived in New York, we first docked at the White Star Line pier to unload the lifeboats from Titanic which had been hauled aboard the rescue ship. As lifeboat 16 was being lowered, I saw a black coat in the bottom and grabbed it, remembering that it belonged to the Irish girl. When I discovered the packet of letters in the pocket I suspected that these were important to her, and that she must have taken them from her suitcase before leaving her cabin.

In an attempt to get the coat and packet of letters back to her (which I have never read), I visited some of the hospitals in New York which I knew had taken survivors. Being in reasonably good health myself, I was not admitted to hospital and was taken in by the Salvation Army until my employer, the White Star Line, could find accommodation for me in the city.

I was told at the St Vincent’s Hospital that a Maggie Murphy and a Peggy Madden had been admitted, but had been discharged earlier that day. I had no idea where they might be travelling onto, other than that Peggy, who I had become quite friendly with on the ship, was travelling on to St. Louis. I have a mind to try and track her down when we have all had chance to recover from our ordeal.

Unable to find Maggie, I have kept her coat which bears a set of rosary beads in one pocket and the packet of letters and some browned cherry blossom petals in the other. I assume the letters are very important to her so I will keep them until such time as I might be able to find her, or her friend Peggy.

I don’t want to write about Titanic or what happened that night. I just want the haunting sounds and images to leave my mind and I swear that I will never set foot on a ship again for as long as I live.

If, in time, this letter and the coat and letters belonging to Maggie are returned to her, please pass on my regards. She was a very brave young lady and I will never know how she must have felt stepping into that lifeboat, leaving those she was travelling with standing on the deck of the boat which we then watched sink to the bottom of the sea.

Whatever happens, I hope she goes on to live a very happy life and that she manages to return to her sweetheart in Ireland. From what little she told me about him, I think she must have loved him very, very much and I think he must have loved her equally.

I would like to declare here in writing that I have never read the letters as I consider them to be a private matter for Maggie’s eyes only. I thank God that we are safe and it would make me a very happy man indeed to see the letters reunited with their rightful owner.

Written by Harry Walsh (of sound mind),

New York

America

Grace folded the page up and placed it carefully onto the table. For a while she couldn’t speak.

‘
Incredible, isn’t it,’ Mr Lockey said. ‘You must keep the letter and give it to your great-grandmother. I hope she will be happy to know how Harry came to have her letters.’

‘
What was he like, your uncle,’ Grace asked, interested to hear more about this young man who had risked so much to save lives and whose integrity was such that throughout his life, he had kept Maggie’s possessions in the hope that he would one day find her.

‘
Ah, Uncle Harry!” Mr Lockey chuckled, ‘
Lucky
Uncle Harry – the man with a permanent twinkle in his eye, a plan up his sleeve and a spring in his step. He was like a second father to me, so I was extremely fond of him – where oh where do I start?!’

For the next two hours Grace absorbed every detail of Harry’s life – how he had been so traumatised by the events of that night and by the loss of so many of his colleagues from Southampton that he refused to ever step foot on a boat again and had found employment with the Cunard line in the offices (‘the safest place to work for a steamship company’ he’d said), unable to bear the sight of the White Star Line swallowtail flag. She heard how his mother was frantic waiting for news of his fate and how she’d stood for days at the docks in Southampton, along with hundreds of other weeping mothers and wives, refusing to leave until she knew what had become of her beloved son. She listened as Mr Lockey told her how Harry’s parents and sister had eventually travelled to New York to start a new life with him, how his father’s health improved and allowed him to work again at the docks and how his mother had become a very influential figure at the Salvation Army, helping those less fortunate than herself. She listened with amazement at how Harry had spent two years trying to track down the girl Peggy Madden who he was sweet on, only to discover her just before the outbreak of war and then to lose contact with her again. How, by the time he returned from war and made his way to her home in St. Louis again, Peggy was married with two children. How, apparently she had laughed when she saw him standing in the driveway and swore that if she didn’t love her husband so much she would have run off with him there and then because he was the most persistent man she had ever met! How they became firm friends, keeping in contact until he was an old man and how he had never married, saying that he would rather be happy and alone than be with anyone other than the Irish girl who filled his dreams every night.