The Sea and the Silence (5 page)

‘I’m forty-two,’ Hedley said urgently. ‘I’ve got everything in life except love. I think I’ve found it here. Look at me, Iz.’ He caught my hand up and brought it to his cheek. ‘I’ll look after everything, employ the best solicitors, I’ll take six months off and we’ll sail around the world. Then, when we come back, we’ll live wherever you please.’

Despite myself, I began to believe that what he was proposing was actually possible. I asked, ‘What about Hector?’

‘He comes with us, of course.’

‘He loves his father.’

‘It’s not difficult any more to get from here to England. He can divide his time during the holidays. He can do whatever he wishes.’

He wiped my eyes. I turned away. ‘I can’t.’

‘Iz. Iz. I know nothing about your life, but I’m prepared to bet it hasn’t been easy, that you’ve had more than your share of disappointments. I want to dedicate myself to making that up to you, to making you happy, whatever it takes, because all it takes is love. This is not outrageous, it is not wrong to want to be happy, people do it the whole time.’

‘You’re mad,’ I said and blew my nose. ‘I think I am too.’

‘Was that madness when we kissed?’ he asked. ‘Or was that the sanest moment of our lives?’

I looked up. ‘Oh, God, here’s Rosa Santry.’

She was walking from the far end of the bank, her son at her side.

‘Iz.’ He gripped my arm. ‘Think about everything I’ve said. Please. I’ve never in my life been more sober or serious. I love you. I want you forever. I realise that you can’t drop everything tomorrow and jump on the train with me, but think about it. Please.’

Rosa was no more than 50 yards away.

I said, ‘Yes.’

I spent the next three weeks in turmoil. Often I saw myself in the bedroom mirror and wondered if I looked hard enough if I might see the demon that had entered me. For no matter how hard I tried, even to the extent of relieving my own want, I couldn’t erase my passion. I had heard it said that, in order for love to be lastingly successful, you have to again and again find a new person within yourself, but I could not reach anywhere within me without touching Hedley. He became fused in my mind with desire lost and squandered happiness. I had not even trusted myself to say goodbye to him, but had gone out and sat on the cliff, something Ronnie had found ill mannered and had been short with me about. But the previous night, Hedley had slipped me a note with the date when he was coming to Dublin for a medical conference and had begged me to meet him there.

I was swamped alternately by guilt and desire. I saw my lovely son and told myself how even happier he would be were his mother the new Mrs Hedley Raven. I saw Ronnie, limping, and the pain it was for him still to drive a car and go about his poky business, and I was swept by the meanness of what I intended. It was neither my fault nor Ronnie’s that the right chemistry had not fermented between us. I kept seeing the coldness in his look, something I would never have imagined possible. Although he would be distraught for a time when I left him, I at least would be happy, surely a better position for both of us than mutual indifference. But was I indifferent, or just drenched by lust? I decided firmly not to go to Dublin, changed my mind twenty times, laughed at my ability to destroy everything I so much cherished, made a dental appointment in Monument for the day in question so that I would not be able to travel; then, with three days to go, said to Ronnie, ‘I think I’d like to go to Dublin to check the house.’

He looked at me, but if he knew it was my first outright lie to him, then it was not apparent.

‘Good idea,’ he said. ‘Bring Hector.’

‘He gets too tired,’ I said. ‘Next time, when he’s a bit older.’

‘Stay the night,’ Ronnie said. ‘Up and down in one day takes too much out of you.’

I boarded the train at eight o’clock and as we reached the foothills and gathered speed, I saw my face reflected in the carriage window and thought of another journey in the opposite direction when I had set out with similar guilt at what I was leaving behind. And as before, as if I were too insubstantial to have abiding concerns, my guilt shrank with each mile and my point of longing grew. In the taxi on the way to the hotel on the Liffey beside the Four Courts, I slipped off my wedding band. Hedley was waiting. He looked anxious, as if he had not believed that I would come.

‘I have a room,’ he said.

I went deaf as we went up the stairs together, not just because of a sense of perfect re-enactment, but because I was terrified. On the landing, Hedley took my hand in his. I clung to him. The room was large with two long windows. A wide, brass double bed stood in the centre, as if on a stage. There was a strange bareness that took me some seconds to come to terms with.

‘Where are your things?’ I asked, for his medical conference was to run over three days.

‘I thought you might prefer it if I did not stay here,’ he said. ‘That it might look better.’

I had dreamed of this, of being alone with him in such a room. I sank into his arms and smelt him again, and then, as if haste were all, we were shedding clothes, mouths together, and I felt his flesh against me, his great need, which matched mine, but time was not there for such reflection since I lay back beneath him on the bed and felt myself move at such speed from his mere touch that I spilled over, as did he, his fingers across my mouth, and the backs of my eyes exploded.

Hedley poured tea, his hand steady. He carried over the cup and saucer to the bed. I could have lain there and watched him forever.

‘You’re spoiling me,’ I said.

He was beautiful, limb perfect, and his skin gleamed. He bent down and kissed me.

‘What about your conference?’ I asked.

‘Doesn’t start till six.’

‘Where is it?’

‘In the Gresham.’

Getting into bed, he worked himself behind me so that I sat in his lap. In the branches of a tree outside our window, a blackbird hopped.

‘I have lots of questions,’ I said.

‘You’re not to worry.’

‘I’m not. I’ve never been happier.’

‘You and I are one now. It’s good.’

I ached anew for him, but the rational part of me demanded that the disorder I was leaving in Sibrille be at least partially tidied.

‘I want to talk about Hector.’

‘We’ll discuss Hector this evening. This time is for you and me.’

He began to kiss my neck, to run his tongue into the little furrow at the base of my hairline. I bent forward and he kissed the knobs at my spine’s top, licking each round and making a slow descent until I had to arch my back to release the sudden, unexpected gush of pleasure. His deft hands moved to my belly and then, down, and he brought me up a notch with his quick but subtle fingers.

‘Kneel!’

I did and reached back for him and he was there in full again, thick to my hand. He cupped my thighs and pulled them wide. I knew suddenly what he was going to do, but craved it as if nothing was too debased or unworthy. He splayed me farther and I ached in my deepest pith to have him where no one had ever been, for this was the most I could give. I heard him spit into his hand, then he came up and began to enter, and pleasure and pain then were almost too much as he strained and I had to grip the bed end with both hands and his mouth was in my hair as he shouted out, ‘
Oh, God!
’

We must have slept, for I awoke with a start and saw him dressed at the bed end, staring at me.

‘You are beautiful,’ he said.

‘Where are you..?’

‘Sleep. Your doctor prescribes it.’

I reached out. I was sore, but it was a happy soreness, as if between us we had initiated something and my mark of it was my proof of love. He caught my wrist, kissed it.

‘What time..?’

‘Sssh! I’ll order a late supper to be brought up.’

He left noiselessly, and I went back to sleep. It was a sleep without dreams, a profound immersion in all the forces that had brought me to this point, as if I were being transported across dark waters, sailing between points only visible to sea things. Darkness was absolute. I awoke to it.

‘Hedley?’

He was in the bed beside me, had come in when I was asleep and had not wanted to awaken me; of this I was sure, because I could smell him. I put on the light. The vastness of the room and my solitary presence made my throat catch. I looked around, since maybe he was somewhere else in there, or hiding. Then I saw the time. Four in the morning. I got up and washed. I was much sorer, but now the prize seemed suddenly inexplicable. I thought of Hector and began to shake. Splashing water on my face, I tried to rinse Hector away and concentrate. Dressed, I went downstairs. The night porter, woken from sleep, leapt to his feet.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Has there been anyone here looking for me? Mrs Shaw.’

The man scratched his head and rubbed his sleepy eyes. ‘Divil a one since I came on, Ma’am.’

I tried to think. ‘I want to go to the Gresham Hotel. Please call me a taxi.’

‘God, Ma’am, it’s four in the morning…’

‘Call me a taxi!’

It was after five when the taxi left me off in O’Connell Street. The Gresham ran to two night porters, both of them in livery and more alert than the one I’d left. They needed to unbolt the hotel’s door.

‘I have an important message for a Mr Raven,’ I said. ‘Mr Hedley Raven. He’s staying here.’

They brought me in and one of them went behind a desk. ‘Mr..?’

‘Raven,’ I said, ‘Hedley Raven. He’s a doctor, he’s here for the medical conference.’

‘That conference finished yesterday at lunchtime,’ the porter said. He turned the page of his book. ‘Dr and Mrs Raven, here they are. Checked out at six yesterday evening. They went to the mail boat. Miss?’

The other one had caught me. It wasn’t my head, it was just my legs that would not work.

‘It’s all right, Miss.’

I saw his concerned face.

‘It’s Mrs,’ I said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

1958

Whenever I dwelt on what I had done in Dublin, it swept me with shame. Not alone the shame of having been used and the manner in which that had occurred, or the shame of my own gullibility, but shame on a deeper level. I had taken the awe-inspiring love I had once known and debased it. That I could have soiled something so precious and been so blind to its need for nurturing drove me to the very edge of reason. I had shamed myself and, in the process, had shamed the dead.

As time went by, however, it slowly became clear that what I had done might well have saved my marriage. For Ronnie knew nothing of Dublin or the Four Courts Hotel and thought that my humours all sprang from womanly moods. My own behaviour had forced me to reconsider my opinion of him and to accept that if he had succumbed to a moment of indiscretion, then I, by my deliberate intent, had exceeded his impropriety by a distance. It was of no use to try and defend my actions by saying that Ronnie had driven me to them, or to plead justification for myself whilst condemning him. We were both human beings who had erred and who now had to make the best of what we had. Our relationship would be decent and dignified and would stand alone without reference or comparison to other experience. I would have to apply myself anew, forgetting everything that had gone before.

At thirteen, Hector was as tall as me and up to Ronnie’s shoulder. He now attended a tiny school in Monument, set up and paid for by the Catholic merchants of the town, but, soon, he would have to go away to secondary school, something I had been preparing for. Then Ronnie and I would be alone in the lighthouse.

One evening in mid-August, when Delaney and I were spending most of every day sewing name tags on to his clothes, Hector came in to where his father and I were sitting and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school in England.’

‘Oh, it’ll be fine, don’t you worry,’ Ronnie said. ‘I remember feeling exactly the same before I left Gortbeg.’

His mouth no longer needed the plastic support, but his face had set into a permanently skewed, almost fractured, look that, sometimes, in brief, unexpected moments, made him seem like a complete stranger.

Hector said, ‘I don’t mind leaving home, it’s just I don’t want to go to England.’

‘Well, I’m afraid, sir, that’s a pity, but you don’t have any more choice in the matter than I did. Sorry, old boy.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘I don’t wish to discuss it, Hector.’

‘Hector, why?’ I asked.

‘Only the real West Brits are still doing it, none of my friends are. They’re all going to school in Dublin.’

‘And learning gobbledygook,’ Ronnie said.

‘The people who still go come back to Ireland and have no friends here,’ Hector said. ‘A friend of mine in school has a sister who got married last year and she’d been to school in England. There wasn’t a single guest at the wedding who lived in Ireland.’

‘Thinking of getting married, are you old boy? Think carefully, if I was you,’ Ronnie drawled.

He had the Anglo-Irish tendency not to engage the specific, to reduce an issue to its most trivial and to forestall the inevitable by refusing to recognise it.

‘I’m not going.’

‘You’ve always been happy up to now about going, Hector. Everything’s arranged. Isn’t it a bit late to say this?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of a discussion which may give rise to false hope,’ said Ronnie. ‘Leave it, shall we?’

‘I’m discussing something with Hector.’

‘Which I deem most unwise.’

‘Nonetheless, I’m still discussing it.’

‘I forbid it.’

‘You… what?’

‘You heard me.’

I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘Hector, please leave the room.’

‘If you’re discussing me, I want to be here,’ said Hector.

‘Please.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘
Leave the room!
’

I was trembling as the boy left, shaking his head.

Ronnie looked at me with a supercilious expression. ‘Congratulations.’

‘How dare you! Is that all you can offer him when something huge in his life arises? A patronising smirk? Thinking of getting married, are you, old boy? What kind of a father are you?’

‘He’s a child,’ Ronnie sighed, weary of the matter.

‘He’s highly intelligent. What’s wrong with what he said? What’s wrong with going to school in Ireland? There must be half a dozen suitable schools. Why does he absolutely have to go to England just because you did?’

‘And my father, and his father.’

‘So?’

Ronnie’s eyes emptied. ‘Tradition may well have ended in your family with you, but here we still value it.’

‘What a despicable thing to say! You’re not capable of discussing the matter on its own merits without dragging in a personal attack!’

‘Does what I say not reflect the truth? Did you not ensure that everything your family held dear would end in one most unlovely debacle?’

‘You… pig!’

‘Am I?’

‘I hate you, Ronnie.’

‘Is that all you can say?’

‘What on earth does my family matter when it comes to deciding where Hector should go to school? For that matter, why should the fact that you and his grandfather went to one school mean that Hector must now go there too? I think, in fact, he’s right. This is Ireland, our own country. Why must everything still relate to England? You’re out of touch.’

‘We’re talking not just about tradition, but about standards, about the type of person you want as your friend, about connections. You think he’ll get that in any school here?’

‘The point he makes is that he will. What connections did you make that are now so vitally important?’

‘More than you imagine,’ Ronnie said, getting up and looking at his watch. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.’

‘You’re ridiculous. We live here in a tiny lighthouse, we own less than one half of the land we did when I married you, we must watch how every penny is spent, you dart here and there like a mouse, trying to be the first to latch on to the newest person who comes into the area and has money. A lot of good going to school in England did you!’

Ronnie turned, his misaligned face all at once white and set.

‘If you’d had any style, we mightn’t be as we are. You let us all down, every day, simply by being you.’

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’

I caught up a cup and hurled it; it bounced from his shoulder and smashed on the floor.

‘Get out!’

Ronnie stopped, then, eyes wild, he went to the stove, snatched up the pot of soup, and hurled it out through the open window into the sea. I picked up a vase and launched it for his head; although he ducked, it caught him high on his temple before disintegrating against the wall. Ronnie, panting, began to throw the furniture the same way as he had the soup. Picking up a heavy chair, I flung it at him, my strength a wonder. The chair caught him full square and he went down, winded. I picked up the breadboard, a generous piece of polished walnut, and went to stave in his head, but he caught my ankles and dragged hard so that I fell back and the board merely hit him in the chest. As if he had been interrupted in some serious task, Ronnie scrambled up and began to pitch every item of cutlery, glassware and crockery out the other kitchen window, many of them landing on his car that was parked below. I was bleeding from my mouth, yet I felt strangely empowered and elated. I picked up a pot stand and made a run at him. Ronnie went down again. I kicked him hard in the jaw. He winced and I wondered if I’d undone all the work of the unspeakable Mr Hedley Raven. I drew back again to kick harder.

‘
Stop!
’

I froze.

Hector was standing there.

‘You’ve both gone mad!’

The boy’s eyes were huge. Each time I tried to take a breath, my chest screamed.

‘It’s all right, Hector,’ said Ronnie, getting up, wincing. ‘We were just airing our differences.’

Hector looked from one of us to the other.

‘And have you stopped, now?’

‘Have we stopped, now?’ Ronnie asked, his teeth bared in pain.

‘Yes, we have stopped now,’ I panted.

In the months that followed, when Hector had gone away to school in England and I was forced to confront my true feelings for my husband, I always came back to our fight that day and, when I did, I always smiled. Like a storm that clears the atmosphere, I had felt immeasurably the better of it. My head was clear and, for the first time in years, I was happy. Although the gaps between our lovemaking were irregular — in itself not unusual for a marriage of a dozen years, I had read — Ronnie’s stamina on these occasions was always short, something I could live with, but with which, I imagined, a succession of mistresses might be impatient. I tried to remember him as I had first met him, his nonchalance with the everyday things of life, his sense of humour and his easy charm. For despite everything, we still had times of sweetness together. They coincided in the main with Ronnie’s business catastrophes. Stripped of his tricks by worry and impending disaster, I saw another Ronnie, devoid of winning ways or the need to dissemble. My wish in those times was perverse: that we could always be like this, an aspiration which involved never-ending misfortune; but at least then I would have him alone, which is to say, a man without pretensions, in need of love, who stayed at home and close to me, who came out the cliffs for walks and who listened as well as spoke.

‘Hector’s getting on well.’

We inched through a herd of port-bound cattle at the top of Captain Penny’s Road.

‘He likes his school.’

‘Not right for an only child to be at home on his own. Needs company.’

‘His every move is a mirror of you.’

‘Boys are like that. I remember how it was with my own father. Wanted to be him.’

We made our way forward as drovers beat and shouted.

‘May I say something?’ Ronnie asked. ‘I’d like to start again, you and me. From scratch. Go back to the very beginning. What do you say?’

I could not conceal my frustration. ‘I don’t know, Ronnie. Really, I don’t.’

‘Please.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

A few nights later I was reading in bed when a knock came to the door of the lantern bay.

‘May I come in?’

It was clear Ronnie had been drinking — not a common occurrence, but now manifested in a fixed, Langley-type grin. He sat on the side of my bed.

‘Big changes.’

‘Oh?’

‘You know. Me drawing a wage, Langley peeing himself, Hector gone. Big, big changes.’

‘Change can be good.’

Ronnie grinned. ‘You don’t change though. You just get more beautiful.’

I felt my eyes brim. Ronnie sat on the bedside, then bent down and we kissed.

‘That was good,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘D’you want to know something? D’you know when I wanted you the most?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘When we fought… you know, before Hector went away. I thought you were magnificent. I couldn’t work out why we hadn’t done it before, got all the bad stuff out in the open. I wanted to come up that night, break down the door and ravage you. Sorry, but it’s the truth.’

‘You’ve been drinking, Ronnie.’

He was now lying on the covers, stroking my neck.

‘Sometimes drink brings out the truth.’

I looked at him, at his warm eyes, his still somehow inviting skin. With drink, he lacked the guile of the day-to-day Ronnie, so that all was left was a quite charming if tipsy, middle-aged man.

‘I don’t want to be hurt again, Ronnie.’

‘You won’t be, ever, I swear.’

‘I wish I could believe you.’

‘That’s all finished. I was a fool, I know I was, but I’ve changed. And apart from being even more beautiful, so have you, I think.’

He had a tenacity at such moments lacking in all the other aspects of his life.

‘You are beautiful,’ he murmured, baring my shoulders and kissing them. ‘So bloody lovely.’