Echoes (74 page)

“Goodbye, David. For a while.”

They didn't touch.

Angela had seen the car drawing up outside the cottage; she had sent Dick scurrying off to bed in case Clare wanted to talk.

Clare stood with Liffey in her arms and watched the car turning and going back down the golf-course road. She gave a little wave but David was looking straight in front of him and didn't see.

“Come in,” Angela said.

“It's very hard to explain.”

“Most things are quite incapable of being explained. I've always thought that,” said Angela.

She showed Clare her bed and made a cup of tea from a kettle which had been boiling in readiness.

“That's to take to bed on your own,” she said. Clare blinked her gratitude at the teacher who knew by magic when people wanted to talk and when there was nothing left to say.

 

Jim O'Brien ran back into the shop looking frightened.

“Dad, Dad, where are you? Where are you?”

“Where would I be but getting out of my bed?” Tom O'Brien grumbled.

“Dad, come here, will you?”

The boy looked frightened.

“Dad, come out with me. . . . Now, come quickly.”

Tom O'Brien pulled his coat over his pajama top. He had his day trousers on and his shoes and socks, he had been dressing on the side of the bed when he heard the shouts.

They ran on to the top of the cliff and Jim pointed down on the beach. “I think it's a person, Dad—it's a body.”

There was wind and spray. Tom O'Brien took off his glasses and wiped them. “It's a shape, but it couldn't be a body. Who'd be in the water in this weather?”

“It is, Dad. It
is.
I'm going down. Will you get the Guards and Dr. Power?”

Jim O'Brien, almost totally deaf, didn't hear his father warning him to take care. He started down the steps to the big treacherous beach at Castlebay where somebody drowned nearly every summer but where they had never seen a body washed in by a winter tide.

 

People seemed to know without being told. They came out of their houses and began to run down the main street. The murmur became louder, and almost without knowing they were doing it they started to check where their own families were. It was still just a figure, facedown in the water. They didn't know for sure whether it was a man or a woman.

“Perhaps it's a sailor from a ship,” they said. But they knew it wasn't anyone who had gone overboard. No nice anonymous death of someone they didn't know. No informing the authorities and saying a few prayers for the deceased Unknown Sailor. This was someone from Castlebay.

They stood in silent groups on the cliff top and watched the first people getting to the water's edge; the boy who had first seen the waves leaving something frightening on the shore; other men too; people from the shops nearby and young men who were quick to run down the path. Then they saw the figures coming down the other path near the doctor's house, kneeling by the body in case, just in case, there was something in a black bag that could bring it back to life.

By the time Father O'Dwyer arrived with his soutane flapping in the wind, the murmur had turned into a unified sound. The people of Castlebay were saying a decade of the rosary for the repose of the soul that had left the body that lay facedown on their beach.

 

David had only had two hours sleep when he heard the shouting. He thought it was still part of his dream, but it was real. He sat up in bed—Clare wasn't there. He remembered the scene last night, taking her up to Angela's house, and he remembered coming back and taking the house apart looking for any trace of the photographs. He knew Clare hadn't taken them with her—he had looked in her small bag. She had only some things for the baby and a nightdress for herself.

He had put off ringing Caroline until it was too late to ring her. Then he told himself it would be cruel to wake her when he had nothing helpful to say.

He had been dreaming that people were coming after him, waving papers or big envelopes at him, all running down Church Street calling at him in anger. In his dream he didn't know why they were so against him but he was frightened and trying to run away.

Then he realized the shouts were real. It was Bumper Byrne's voice and Mogsy's, and then his father's.

“Come quickly. There's someone on the beach. There's been a drowning.”

His heart nearly burst in fear.

He ran down the stairs in his crumpled shirt and trousers; he hadn't undressed last night.

He caught the unfortunate Mogsy Byrne; who was at the doorway by his arms. “Who is it? Goddamn you, who
is
it?”

“I don't know . . . I don't. I don't . . .” Mogsy was stammering at the wild-eyed look of David Power who was always so calm and capable.

“
Tell
me,” David roared at him. “Tell me or I'll break your neck.”

“He's got his face down, David,” Mogsy managed to get out. “I left the cliff before they knew. They said to come quickly.”

He had said “he.” It was a man. It was a man, thank God—it was a man. Oh, God, thank you for letting it be a man.

David's eyes had cleared. He grabbed a coat and ran to the surgery for his bag, his father was already there.

“Don't come down the steps. Please, Dad. I'll do it. Come down the other way.”

“I've been coming down those steps to take bodies out of the water since before you were born.”

“Who is it? Is he dead?”

“They don't know. They think it's Gerry Doyle.”

David put out his hand to steady himself on a desk. Just beside a big brown envelope printed with the words DOYlE'S PHOTOGRAPHICS.

His father was already out of the surgery and heading toward the cliff. David steadied himself, put the envelope in a drawer of his own things, down at the bottom of it. And with shaking legs he followed his father to the cliff path.

They saw the group around the body and realized even at this distance that their work would not be needed. Father O'Dwyer had been sent for, he was the only one who might be any help to that body which lay spread-eagled on the beach. Even through the wind and rain and from far away David knew it was Gerry Doyle's lifeless body. He held his arm out to steady his father.

“Young fool,” Dr. Power said. “Bloody young lunatic, his whole life before him. What did he want to do that for? Bloody criminal fool to throw away the one life God gave him.”

David's heart was like stone when they turned the body over and he saw the lacerations and tears down the side of the face of Gerry Doyle. As if in deference to his father he stood back and let the older man pronounce what everyone knew, that life was extinct.

 

“Where's Clare? Will the pair of you come in and have breakfast with us?”

“She's not here, Dad. She spent the night up at Angela Dillon's.”

“She
what
?”

“Dad, please. You asked me where she was. I told you.”

“Yes, yes, you did. Well, will you come in and have a bit of breakfast? You could do with one after all that.”

“No. No, thanks. I'll make a cup of tea—that's all I want.”

“And has my grandchild gone to live up with Mr. and Mrs. Dillon, or am I not to ask about that either?”

There was a bit of a smile on his face to take the harm out of the question. But it didn't hide the worry.

“It was only last night, Dad. It'll sort itself out.”

“Clare has some kind of flu. She was shivery and very jumpy last night. I'm not interfering. I'm just telling you.”

“Did she say what was wrong?”

“That she was frightened. She had a cup of tea with us. I brought her back. You weren't home.”

“Yes.”

Dr. Power narrowed his eyes. “Lord God, is that Gerry's van parked in the lane over there? It
is.
What on earth is it doing up here? Lord have mercy on him, poor fool. And he could be one of the nicest fellows you'd ever talk to.”

 

Clare slept, to her great surprise. She slept well in the strange white bed with its clean hard sheets and its hot-water bottle. Liffey slept in a cot. Clare had been surprised when Angela said there was a cot, she had forgotten that Angela kept summer visitors, and had thought it wise to invest in two cots years ago when her mother was still alive.

Liffey too had slept. Maybe it was being away from the roar and crash of the sea, or from all the anxiety.

Clare only woke because Angela had come in with a cup of tea. To her surprise, Angela had drawn up a chair beside the bed and sat down. Surely she wasn't going to give a lecture or want a heart-to-heart chat at this time in the morning.

Certainly Angela's face looked drawn and strained.

Clare thanked her for the tea and waited.

“Take a big sip.”

This was different; there was bad news of some kind. She put down the cup and looked almost on reflex at Liffey as if to make sure that she was all right. “What is it?”

“There's been an accident. Gerry Doyle was drowned. They've just carried his body up from the beach.”

Total silence. Only the sounds from Liffey's cot where she played happily with the red satin rabbit whose ears had been torn off long ago.

“Clare?”

“He's dead. Is he dead?”

“Yes, it doesn't seem possible. Gerry of all people. There was no one as full of life.”

Angela broke off as she looked at Clare's face. It was expressionless. She just sat in the white bed with her long hair tied loosely behind her pale face, staring straight ahead of her. Her hands were clasped around her knees.

It wasn't natural to react like that. Angela was alarmed.

Clare
had
been friendly with Gerry of course, very friendly maybe. Perhaps even now when Clare's marriage seemed to be going so disastrously wrong, Gerry had been on hand to give consolation. Could that be the explanation of this sense of shock and disbelief? Angela reached out her hand, hoping that if she patted Clare's arm or did something warm the girl might come out of this trance.

She was totally unprepared for Clare to throw herself into Angela's arms, sobbing and shaking. And the only words she could distinguish over and over were, “He's really dead. Thank God. Thank God.”

 

They said it was accidental death. That had to be said. Otherwise he couldn't be buried in consecrated ground. And things were bad enough for the poor Doyles without that.

They said he must have been out for a walk and slipped, his face and side had been very lacerated so he could have been walking on the rock pools, everyone knew that Gerry Doyle loved to balance there. That's what they said but nobody believed it, not for a moment. They knew it was suicide.

It had to be suicide, his business was in ruins, it was a matter of weeks before it would have been taken from him, there was a farmer out in the country who had been making very open threats to come after Gerry on account of the farmer's daughter being pregnant and Gerry Doyle taking no interest in this state of affairs. Fiona Conway, pregnant and heartbroken, told how he had said he wouldn't be in Castlebay for much longer, but she had thought he meant he was going to England. Mary Doyle his mother said that only two days previously he had sent her £20 in an envelope with no explanation, just the words
From Gerry
. Agnes O'Brien said that she had been saying for months that the boy was in trouble of some kind but nobody had ever listened to her. Josie Dillon said he had cashed two checks at the hotel which had bounced but they had kept it quiet, and Gerry had thanked her and said when he went to another land and made his fortune he would think of her. She had thought he was going to emigrate,
how
could anyone have thought he would do something like this?

As quickly as they could the formalities were organized and the body was released for burial.

Gerry Doyle would be laid to rest after ten o'clock Mass on Thursday, Father O'Dwyer announced from the pulpit, and blew his nose loudly because he still couldn't take it in.

 

David went through his work automatically, everywhere he went they talked about the tragedy. A woman with chest pains pointed to the pictures on the walls, framed photographs of the First Communions and Confirmations. He was a lovely boy, always a laugh, never took anything too seriously. In the next house the old man who had hardening of the arteries was more interested in what could have happened to poor young Doyle than he was about his own imminent departure to the county home which David was trying to introduce.

“He was practically born in the water that young lad, which is unusual in these parts. Half of Castlebay never takes to the sea at all, but the young Doyle fellow, he swam like a fish.”

In the room of a ten-year-old girl with jaundice they talked as much of Gerry Doyle as of the patient. He told them not to be worried by the color of her urine, it was quite natural that it would turn the color of port wine. They nodded and said that they had heard Gerry Doyle's business was in a bad way but surely he wouldn't drown himself over a thing like that? There had to be more to it than that.

“If people drowned themselves when their businesses went wrong, wouldn't the sea be full of bodies?” asked the child's father.

David agreed absently and looked at the little girl's eyes. They were yellow and he told her that her skin would go a little bit yellow like a Chinese.

“Are the Chinese yellow?” the girl asked. “Really yellow?”

“Come to think of it, they're not—any I saw aren't yellow at all.”