SHE WATCHED THEM LEAVE, AND WAVED GOODBYE FROM the pier as Mr and Mrs Savage, accompanied by their newborn son, boarded the ferry to England. Annie was crying, but she didn’t know why. Lily with the baby carriage, a bag full of rubber nipples, feeding bottles and tins of Cow & Gate Milk Food, advertised as the best health insurance policy for Empire children. Edgar would be an empire child, Annie thought. He would enjoy all the privileges and benefits of being English, well-educated and rich. She had to give him the best shot at life, and that meant letting him become a Savage.
She watched the boat. Seagulls cried overhead. A grey, drizzly sky. Her breasts ached, missing the tiny child she barely got to hold. She’d have to express the milk soon. Her whole body felt different. But it would come back, she knew. And perhaps she could have other children, later, when she was ready.
She turned her back on the ship as it started to slowly sail away. She looked on the city, grey homes under a grey sky, peaceful, content: or so it seemed. Somewhere in Cork Eleanor Wallace laid down plans, somewhere the English soldiers were keeping guard. In the studio, perhaps, Lady Julia was seeking to train a new apprentice. Somewhere a man lay dead, waiting for his photograph to be taken in memoriam. A cleaner would be sweeping the Palace of Varieties from last night’s excesses. In the woollen mills of Blarney the workers would be milling wool. A sense of calm engulfed her then. The thought of a new world and a new life filled her with a promise that kept her afloat. She turned back, and the ferry was small against the horizon, and then it vanished entirely. Annie let the tears flow. They would stop in time.
*
‘Hi, Jamie,’ she said. She laid the wreath of flowers on his grave. Black earth, white stone, a grey sky. She longed for sun.
‘His name’s Edgar,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I didn’t name him like you wanted. But he was never really yours. You’d have had to stick around for that.’
No one else around. The cemetery was quiet. A bird chittered on a branch.
‘It’s for the best,’ Annie said. Telling him, or herself, she didn’t really know. ‘And now you can have Ireland all to yourself, forever.’
Jamie didn’t answer. She wondered how long he’d rot down there before there were only bones.
‘I’m leaving,’ she said. ‘I have enough money to make a new life. I might start a pub, over in America. I have the feeling there’ll be a lot of thirsty Irishmen there.’ She tried to smile, for his benefit. ‘I’ll call it Annie’s,’ she said.
She reached for her pocket watch to check the time but, of course, it was no longer there. She’d given it to Lily to give to Edgar one day, when he was older. Something to remember her by. She didn’t need that stupid pocket watch anymore anyway. It was just one more tie to a life she was determined to leave behind.
‘Goodbye, Jamie,’ she said.
*
Joe Doyle was where he always was when she needed him most. Leaning back against his cart, smiling, a blade of grass between his lips. He looked up when he heard her coming. Charlie-Next-Door’s mum looked out through the blinds, saw the two of them and shut the blinds closed.
‘Hey, Annie,’ Joe said.
‘Hey, Joe.’
‘One last ride, right?’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Why, you’ll miss me?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I will.’
Then she was hugging him, for the first time, she realised. First and last.
‘I’ll miss you too, Joe. I’ll miss you a lot.’
‘Well,’ he said, when she released him. ‘I could always come visit sometime. I heard they have ice cream machines in New York on every street, in any flavour you could ever want. Can you imagine such a thing, Annie?’
‘No,’ she said, laughing, ‘no, I can’t.’
‘Just send me a postcard,’ he said. ‘When you get there. Just to let me know you’re safe.’
‘I will,’ she said, both of them knowing that she won’t.
‘Well, we should go,’ Joe said. ‘Don’t want to miss the tide and all.’
‘She isn’t docking for another two days,’ Annie said. ‘But you’re right. Here.’
She put the keys in his hands. He looked at them a long moment.
‘Are you sure?’ he said.
‘I’m sure.’
‘Here,’ he said. He gave her an envelope. She didn’t need to look inside to know it had the rest of the money. She put it away. She had squeezed as much out of Cork as she ever could.
‘Look after the old dump for me, will you?’ she said.
‘I’ll love it,’ Joe said. ‘I never had a home of my own.’
Annie didn’t say anything to that. She got on the cart. The horse clip-clopped sedately along the cobbled street, up the hill and down again, until the city ended and the green world began.
*
‘I’d like to come back as a moss,’ Joe said. ‘So green and soft, so green and soft. To lie upon an ancient trunk and be. No thought, no sound but the rain…’ He stopped, looking startled.
‘That’s nice,’ Annie said. They were two hours out of Cork. All that water, reflecting the sky. She thought she’d miss it, at last, once it was no longer there. In the distance a man was digging potatoes out of the dirt. A farmhouse and smoke rising from a chimney, a woman scattering seeds for her chickens. In the other direction, the shadow of a gaunt fisherman pulling in nets. This is how the land was, this is how it would always be. Under all that skies her people lived upon the land, fed on it and fed it in their turn. Caught between ocean and land, islanders adrift in a cold, biting wind.
‘I must have heard it somewhere,’ Joe said.
The road wound up and down and around. A dog barked in the distance. The horse moved with the same patient, even walk, pulling the cart, Joe and Annie tiny under all that sky. Clouds shifted overhead, made shapes Annie couldn’t read. Portents of a future. She thought about the baby. He will be happy, she thought. He will have everything.
She thought about the ship. It would be docking in Cherbourg about now.
‘How does it go?’ she said.
‘What?’ Joe said.
‘The rest of the poem.’
‘I don’t know,’ Joe said.
Annie shrugged. She felt suddenly free, unburdened of her past. The miles went past. They caught the ferry to Great Island, the ferryman dour, his face as lined as a cobweb. She paid the toll. Crossed running water.
Gentle hills and the final stretch, the horse pulling more laboriously now, until at last they reached the top of the final rise and she beheld Queenstown down below, along the slope and on the harbour, gaily painted houses and the beginnings of a grand cathedral, only half-built, rising over the town. They had been building it for over half a century and it was still not finished. Below this house of God the shipyards, and out on the cold grey sea the prison on Spike Island and the garrison on Haulbowline. They rode down the steep hill to the city below.
She felt the first tremor of excitement rise in her then. The cold grey waves against the gaily decorated pier, and the offices of the White Star Line right there.
‘I’m going to stay the night, go back tomorrow,’ Joe said.
‘I can get you a room,’ Annie said.
‘I have an aunt in town,’ Joe said.
‘Another Doyle?’
He smiled. ‘There is always a Doyle,’ he said. ‘Besides, I thought I might wave you off. Someone should.’
‘You don’t need to,’ she said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I know I don’t.’
She smiled as she got off the cart.
‘This is the place?’ she said.
‘This is it.’
‘All right.’
Annie went inside. The Rob Roy Hotel on the waterfront. The wave of music hit her as soon as she walked through the door. The air was thick with a miasma of smoke, sweat, spilled beer. Bodies pressed against bodies, moving to the wild music of the band. It could have been midnight in there. There was no sense of time. Someone grabbed her arm, twirled her around, another pushed a glass of Murphy’s into her hands. She was half drunk by the time she got through the throng.
‘The room? Yes! Upstairs!’ the woman who ran the place shouted over the noise when Annie finally found her. ‘You won’t get much sleep tonight, love, sorry!’
‘That’s all right!’ Annie shouted back. ‘I’ll sleep on the ship!’
The woman grinned.
‘That’s what they all said, too!’
Annie went upstairs, to the small room the size of a cupboard. It won’t be any larger on the ship, she thought. She stowed her luggage and went back down. By the time she got there Joe Doyle was already at the bar, looking like he too was going to America. She went and joined him. He raised his glass to her.
‘To Annie Connolly,’ he said. ‘Our dearly departed. Who lived, and laughed – if not often – and loved, though perhaps too much. You weren’t long for this world, and too good for it. Rest in peace.’ He raised his glass high, and was joined by all the other mourners in the bar, and all the people that they mourned.
‘To Annie!’ Joe Doyle cried.
He was met with a roar as everyone cheered and drank. This was it, the vigil for those who were to cross the big water, never to be seen again. An American wake. The barman poured whiskey. Annie drank, the liquid burning her throat. Stupid warmth spread through her. The music rose, the bodies swayed, and the party would have gone on forever. Annie thought of caverns deep in the hills, where tiny men and women lived and lured the traveller into a great feast and dance that never ended, that went all through some eternal night as outside the decades passed unbidden. She forgot everything, for the dead carry no memories with them beyond the dark sea. Another drink and then another. She could go on forever.
*
She woke with sunlight burning a hole through her head. She groaned. A warm male body on the mattress beside her grunted something unintelligible and rolled over. Annie crawled out and threw up into a bucket. She felt a little better after that.
She had no time to wash. She ran a wet cloth over herself and dressed hurriedly, picked up her gear. She went downstairs, stepping over prone bodies. The barman was asleep at the bar. Annie stepped outside. The sunlight hit her. The biggest ship she’d ever seen nestled in the sea between the harbour and the islands. Damn but she was beautiful. A monster of the deeps risen, a creature so majestic it could cross oceans with no more effort than it took a woman to cross the road from one side to the other carrying her shopping. Annie’s heart beat faster. The promenade thronged with people. A brass band played. A priest offered heartfelt prayers. Kids kicked a ball down the street. Porters carried luggage. Passengers lined up the deck of the ship, watching Queenstown. Hundreds of them, from England and Europe and the Near East, they came from all over to take this voyage of a lifetime, to seek out a new home, a new world, where they could remake themselves and be something new; something that was never seen before.
Annie smiled. From a vendor on the waterfront she bought a pair of tinted glasses. She put them on against the sun.
Then, carrying her luggage, she made her way up the gangplank and onto the titanic waiting ship.