The Sea and the Silence (7 page)

‘No less than an example to everyone — but who am I to talk, without a wife to my name? Yet the principle of the original bequest remains. How long is it since we went to Dublin that day? Eight years?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Heavens above! Of course, how could you forget and the circumstances in which you came home? I lit candles that night in Dublin for the child. And for you. Poor Jennings passed on, you know. Ah yes, fell down dead during an inspection, poor fellow. He was a gentleman.’

‘He was. Dick, this is not like selling the house, it is going to be our home. My home.’

‘Quite. However, legislation has been passed recently and there is lots more of it on the go — God knows how anyone can keep abreast — which complicates questions of ownership. A wife can no longer be put out on the street, thank God, on the basis that the house is no longer hers. Man and wife living in a house confers rights of joint ownership regardless of whose name is on the deeds. And thus the same would apply should you move to Dublin. It is your house now, but were it to become the home of yourself and Captain Shaw, then it would no longer be your house in the way Peppy intended.’

‘Whose house would it be?’

‘Half of it would be his.’ Dick’s mournful eyes swivelled. ‘I’m sorry. You must of course be free to live wheresoever you choose, I’m just like a tiresome old uncle who has your best interests at heart.’

‘I’m older than you,’ I said and laughed.

‘Nevertheless.’

‘What do I do now?’

‘Think about it and we’ll have another chat.’

He was a man whose dogged adherence to a principle was both his greatest asset and what limited him most, for on the one hand he was right, I thought as I drove home — the house in Dublin was my safety net; but, then again, who didn’t change over years, and why should Peppy’s bequest be made an obstacle rather than grasped as an opportunity? Heat burned into the little car. In fields either side, hay was being turned, or ricked, or drawn in for the distant winter. Men worked, sleeves rolled to the elbow, or in some cases they had taken off their shirts so that their torsos looked piebald, milk-white bodies from which sprang nutty forearms and necks. Heat stood over the causeway in undulating veils as I drove in. Ronnie’s car was parked around the back of the lighthouse, a surprise, since he had said that morning he would be gone all day.

‘Ronnie?’

His sports jacket was thrown on the chair in the kitchen.

‘Ronnie? Are you up there?’

An open window banged somewhere.

‘Ronnie?’

I climbed the curving stone stairs and yearned for Dublin, a place I knew little of, but where we would at least have some money. The door to his room stood ajar.

‘Are you in there?’

I walked in and saw the open window through which years ago I had thrown everything he had owned. I stood at it and saw a pink head floating twenty yards out to sea.

‘Ronnie!’

He turned around.

‘Come on in!’ he cried. ‘It’s magnificent!’

They prayed for rain at Mass in Sibrille at the end of June. People spoke of ground like rock, of meadows that had been left too scorched to cut, of crazed cattle stampeding for water. When the rain did come in the first week of July, it washed down the hill of the village, taking weeks of dung and dead flies with it. One day the sea had lain like blue silk, the next it stood rearing, outraged and black as ink. I felt the opportunity slipping, as if Dick Coad’s advice had put my resolve into a neutral gear so that my common sense was ebbing. Money was desperately short. Ronnie was considering signing on the unemployment register in Monument, an action that would, we knew, cause a sensation. We had no telephone, the man who had come to cut off the electricity had been narrowly persuaded to come back in a week when there would be a cheque and I had not settled our grocery account in Wise’s since the previous March. And yet Ronnie had an old lift in his gait. He got his petrol on tick from a variety of places and kept alluding to the substantial deal he was coaxing along, the one that would ‘set us up’. I hated his deals. I hated his ‘foraging’, his being out late at night, the distance that came between us whenever things went well for him and he didn’t need me. In Dublin, he could sign on for welfare payments and no one would give a damn. He might even get a job. Dick Coad might be wise in one respect, but in the main thrust of what I knew was right for us, he had erred. I got up one morning after Ronnie had left and drove into Monument in a downpour.

I felt ashamed for not spending more time with Langley — Ronnie had not been to see him since Christmas — but the County Home was a grim ordeal for visitors, stinking as it did of cheap food and bladder. Yet to those like Langley, clinging with grim determination to three meals a day and life, it was a home. I passed the gates and prayed that his merciful release would not be too much longer. Dick Coad was not in. His sister who sold stationery from the shop downstairs had no idea where he was.

‘Will it ever stop?’ she asked as we stood in her shop looking out at the rain.

It was too wet to shop and, anyway, I had no money. With wipers whirring, I drove out on to Long Quay, already under an inch of water. Through a lapping tide, I marvelled at how a town that a week ago had spoken of water rationing now resembled Venice. Short of the Commercial Hotel, a large woman, soaked, was lugging along a heavy suitcase. As I passed, she turned.

‘Bibs?’

Hair was stuck to Bibs Toms’s big cheeks.

‘Christ,’ she said as she got in, ‘I had forgotten quite how hopeless they are in this town’.

‘What a nice surprise.’

‘I must have waited at the station for three-quarters of an hour for a taxi that never came.’

‘I’ll bring you home.’

Steam rose from Bibs as we met open country and the rain eased.

‘This is Langley’s old car, isn’t it? Is he still..?’

‘Yes. But he might as well be dead, poor man.’

‘He was my hero as a child. No one crossed country like old Captain Shaw.’

‘You must like Dublin. I heard you have a very good job.’

‘Well, a job.’ Bibs snorted and squeezed her hair into a queue. ‘I work in a shop, if you must know. We sell wool.’

‘I’m sure it’s interesting.’

‘It’s dreadful.’ Then Bibs smiled. ‘But on Saturday afternoons, I take a bus to Rathfarnham and ride out hunters for a businessman.’

‘So you’ve two jobs, that’s clever.’

‘Oh, I don’t charge him, I just do it for the love.’

Exactly half way to Sibrille was Toms Cross. The right-hand road doubled back for more than two miles before the first acres of the Toms’s land was reached.

‘We had the best hunt in memory from a meet here,’ Bibs said. ‘The fox ran all the way to Eillne, can you believe.’

‘How often do you come home?’

‘Not a lot. It’s too expensive. Besides, I have my horses in Dublin now.’

‘Your sister’s a pretty girl,’ I said as the road wound around and the summer hedges began to wetly scrape the windows. ‘Hector was very taken with her.’

‘She wrote to say something dreadfully important is happening and that I must come home at once,’ Bibs said. She shivered. ‘Hope she hasn’t got herself pregnant with that Beasley creature.’

‘It’s a big undertaking for a girl to run on her own. She’s very brave,’ I said as we drove in by gateless piers.

‘And looks after Father, another disaster. D’you mind going to the front door? It’s less carrying with this damn case.’

From the front, the old house appeared uninhabited. The lower windows were shuttered, the paint of the hall door hung in great, drooping tongues and ivy had run amok into the eaves and was threatening the chimneys. Bibs got out and put her suitcase by the boot-scrape.

‘Come in and have tea.’

‘I should get home.’

‘Just for ten minutes,’ said Bibs and led the way around the side.

We squeezed in past laurel bushes and brought down cupfuls of rainwater on ourselves.

‘I have such mixed feelings about this house, Bibs was saying. ‘When I’m away from it, I think about it the whole time, about each room, about the yard and the boxes. I go to sleep every night remembering every horse that ever stabled here, even those that were in livery. I smell them. It’s ridiculous.’

We had come into a yard at the back.

‘And then when I come home, as now, with months gone by since my last visit, as soon as I arrive the whole thing begins to take on another appearance. Does that sound daft? It’s as if I’ve been remembering another place entirely when I was away, for as soon as I get here I want to leave again.’

She halted and turned to me.

‘Do you think I’m completely mad?’

I heard her and yet her words held no meaning. Nor did I see her, for I was staring at the kitchen window of the farmhouse where her sister, Lucy, naked, was braced forward over the sink, with my husband, Ronnie, behind her.

CHAPTER TEN

1969

For the first six months, each time I looked out of the bay window and saw a sky of racing clouds, my eyes, by reflex, sought the sea. The silence too I found eerie, especially at night. I had not realised how much part of me the ever-soughing sea had become, how the blunt crash of water on rock had become so essential. The sound of wind through trees was altogether different, sibilant, light breezes rinsing through the Dublin suburbs and leaving in their aftermath vales of stillness.

I had written and told Hector everything. He had not replied for nearly a month, a delay I found unbearable, and I waited every day for his letter as if for an imprimatur. I had letters from Rosa Santry keeping me up to date with the Monument gossip, but I found that the trivia essential to living in a community irrelevant and tiresome once one had left. I awoke one night, startled, and sat up drenched in sweat. I had had a dream, and although it was already fading, some vivid images remained: dead men in cloaks, blood in their nostrils, a copse surrounded by a waist-high wall of large, uneven stones that incorporated a fairy mound where oak trees grew at eccentric angles.

When Hector’s letter arrived at last — he had been on manoeuvres — it seemed almost flippant and assumed that the separation was temporary, for he asked whether if he came home for Christmas I would be back in Sibrille by then. I replied, explaining the now-legal nature of affairs, and how I had wanted nothing except my freedom. Although I did not say so to Hector, I realised that what freedom meant was that I would be living on my own from then on and be like the many women forced to refashion their lives from the unfriendly starting point of middle age. Ronnie, on the other hand, planned never to be alone. I learned from Bibs Toms that Lucy had put her father into the County Home, sold the farm and moved into the lighthouse. Ronnie had turned the corner.

I lived on remarkably little. With the help of my lovely Dick Coad, I made a flat in the garden basement and secured a tenant. My new circumstances, in which money was not a constant, unspoken problem, made me realise how insecure we had been in Sibrille and how that state of affairs, created and sustained by Ronnie, had contributed to my mute acquiescence. I joined the Royal Dublin Society where, thirty years before, my father, then a member, had brought me to the Spring Show. One or two people still spoke of him.

Hector’s letter in the summer was a sprawling half a dozen pages. It appeared he had come to Ireland and gone to Sibrille unannounced — to me a hurtful piece of information — and discovered Lucy. It had, by his own admission, been an ugly scene. Things broken, Lucy screaming and driving away, Ronnie putting Hector out at the point of a shotgun. Hector had walked to Monument where he had booked into the Commercial Hotel and, he wrote, for two days had gone on a bad bender. Ronnie had come into town, but Hector had refused to see him. Nor did he want to face coming to see me in Dublin, so ashamed was he of everything that had taken place. I read a new maturity in his letter. He said he never again wanted to meet Ronnie and asked me to come to England. My reaction was mixed. Absurd as it would be for me to be pleading Ronnie’s case, neither would I try to prosper in Hector’s affections by damning him. Not that I had anything but contempt for my husband; rather, I wanted to spare my son the debilitating environment of hate. So I spent several days over my reply, attempting to achieve a balance and hoping that in Hector’s new wisdom, I would find the consolation for which I ached. But before my letter could be posted, word came from Dick Coad in Monument to say that Langley Shaw was dead.

We drove south in late August sunshine in a car rented by Hector at Dublin Airport. I had brought a picnic basket and we stopped along the coast at a place where wooden benches overlooked the flat Irish Sea.

‘How are you coping?’ he asked.

We both had the same green eyes, but Hector’s had been newly wrought by a process of pain.

‘Better. No problems about money, for one thing. And life is always better when something nasty has been confronted.’

‘You look well.’

‘Thank you, Hector.’

‘Have you… is there…’

‘No, there is no one.’

‘I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know that if there was, I shouldn’t mind.’

‘That is very sweet of you.’

I took his hand and warmed my cheek with it. He had filled out into a man and his hair was cut short except for a quiff at the front that fell over his forehead. I looked at his big hands and wondered what kind of a woman he would find.

‘What about you? They must all be swooning over you.’

‘Nothing too serious, Mother, don’t worry.’

‘I won’t. I’m sure she’ll be lovely.’

‘She’ll be like you.’

‘Oh, Hector, that’s kind but you mustn’t waste your life looking for a younger me. It’s not worth it.’

‘I have to make that decision.’

As the peak of Dollan came into view, he asked, ‘Are you going to speak to him?’

‘I shall sympathise with him.’

‘I shan’t. I think he has let us down in a way that is beyond forgiveness.’

‘I find that concept difficult, Hector.’

He pulled in at one of the bends in the foothills as the town appeared all at once below us.

‘You could have left him, couldn’t you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You were in love with someone else, that doctor who came from England after Ronnie’s accident.’

‘You mean Hedley Raven? Where on earth did you get that idea?’

‘Rosa Santry told me.’

‘Rosa Santry?’

Hector covered my hand with his.

‘When I was in Monument last year, Rosa came in to see me. Dick Coad asked her to, I think. They thought I was going to top myself or something. Beautiful woman. She told me that years ago she saw you and this English doctor together on the riverbanks in Main. She said you were in love.’

I could not stem my tears, nor even protest innocence. ‘I didn’t know she saw us.’

‘As long as it wasn’t my fault.’

‘How could it possibly have been your fault?’

‘You probably thought you had to stay with Ronnie on account of me.’

Shame rose within me like a monster. ‘Hector, he meant nothing. Believe me, he was nothing at all.’

Hector had reserved two rooms in the Commercial. It seemed eerie being in lodgings once again in a town I had come to know so well. Before supper, I went for a walk down Long Quay. Attended by swarms of seagulls, trawlers were discharging their boxes of catch. Farther down the wharf, a ship was taking on lumber as members of her crew, their eyes white in their dark faces, leant over the deck rails and smoked cigarettes. I thought, for all its size, how much more tame Dublin was than Monument, how in Dublin one lived in settled, leafy suburbs untouched by commerce or the smell of fish or foreign tobacco. Hector, because of everything that had happened, because of how he now saw Ronnie, would never come to live here, might never, in fact, come back here again. For both our sakes, I had hoped he might return: for his own, because I valued Monument so dearly on his behalf; and for mine because I had imagined myself coming down to visit him. He was in the bar reading the evening paper when I came back in. The front page showed that Ulster was on fire: buses and cars alight, riots in the cities.

‘There’s talk of us being sent, you know,’ he said as we sat down either side of an upright plastic menu wedged in a block of wood. ‘To keep both sides apart.’

I felt myself go dizzy. ‘I’d prefer if you didn’t.’

Hector smiled at me kindly. ‘It’s part of my job, Mother.’

I had not ever thought of this, but now it seemed grotesque.

Hector was saying, ‘It may all fizzle out. We may not be sent at all. God, I’m hungry. D’you think their steak is any good?’

There and then, I wanted to tell him what I had sworn I never would, but I needed time to think and to prepare myself.

Hector was saying, ‘You like it down here, don’t you? Do you have to live in Dublin… I mean, just because that’s where you own a house?’

‘I think by living in Dublin I can love Monument best.’

‘I’ll never live here,’ he said. ‘Not because I’m afraid of bumping into Ronnie — I couldn’t care less, to be frank — but, and this sounds odd, I’ve never felt I belong here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s an inner thing. I feel more at home in England than in Ireland, and that’s being honest.’

‘You do belong here, Hector, believe me,’ I said. ‘Monument is where you belong.’

Langley had been brought to Sibrille’s church and next morning we got there early to put our flowers on his coffin. Local people stood outside the church door and removed their hats when they saw me. My nostrils were met by the smell of candle wax as we walked in and the heels of our shoes echoed in the empty church.

‘Mrs Shaw?’

A small, hunched man holding a bowler hat at his chest stepped from the shadows. I recognised him as the undertaker from Peppy’s funeral.

‘You’re welcome home, Ma’m. Would you like to see the captain?’

For a moment, the meaning of his words confused me. Then I grasped what he was asking.

‘Oh, you mean, Langley. Hector, he’s asking do we want the coffin opened.’

Hector drew in his breath. ‘Why not?’

The man removed wreaths from the lid and placed them around the bier, then with quick, knowing fingers went to screws along the side and gently lifted off the top. I stared.

‘Isn’t he the real old captain? The real McCoy’, the undertaker said.

Langley was dressed in hunting pink, complete with neck stock, britches and gleaming black boots with the brown top cuffs of a master of foxhounds. In one yellowing hand was clasped his riding crop; in the other, his hunting horn. Above all this splendour presided his head, midway to the skeletal, but touched up with foundation and rouge so that no resemblance whatsoever to Langley Shaw remained.

‘Good Lord,’ Hector said.

‘Whose idea was it?’ I asked.

‘Captain Shaw’s idea, Ma’m, I mean, your… his son’s idea. To send him off in style the way he liked.’

‘Could you not have put a horse in too?’ Hector asked.

We settled on the left of the central aisle, one pew from the front. Very quickly, the little church filled as people came to the coffin and genuflected and placed down their flowers. Langley might not have lived here in over ten years, nor hunted this country in thirty, but the respect he was due for his exploits shone from the faces of the countrymen and women who had come to bury him. Nor was his ancient magnanimity to the Catholic Church forgotten, judging by the numbers of priests making their way, satchels in hand, through the alter rails to the sacristy. Father O’Dea, now a parish priest in Monument, paused and shook our hands.

‘The end of an era, or maybe not,’ he said and winked at Hector. ‘I don’t think I’d bother hunting if there wasn’t a Shaw to show me the way.’

We sat there at the front, unable to turn in our seats and inspect the whispering congregation. Then, as if a blade had fallen, the murmuring ceased. I could hear nothing. Hector was seated forward, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. It was a sliding noise at first, imperceptible unless you listened for it. I strained my eyes into the very corners of their sockets. My husband, alone, had arrived level with our pew. It was Ronnie, beyond a doubt, yet it was Ronnie with twenty years added. He stood, looking down at us. Then, he genuflected, a most laborious business, and took his place in the foremost pew on the aisle’s other side.

I remember little of the service or of the eulogies, hunting stories and prayers. Three teams each of six men from the locality shared the shouldering of Langley out into a day of blissful sunshine, of high swallows, of warm air tinged with the ozone from the nearby sea. When he was lowered down, the huntsman sounded the ‘gone away!’, shrill pips that stirred the blood, and then the long, mournful notes that draw in the close of the hunting day.

‘Ronnie.’

He turned to me.

‘I just wanted you to know that I am very sorry for your grief. I feel for you.’

‘Thank you, Iz.’

He was looking over my shoulder to where Hector had been a moment before.

‘Will you and Hector come back to the pub for a drink? I’ve arranged food.’

‘I think not, Ronnie.’

‘Iz, can we not… things are not good.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it.’

‘I’ve been a fool.’

I couldn’t hurt him beside his father’s open grave.

‘Ronnie, we are what we are. It’s not our fault. Don’t torture yourself, not today.’

‘Hector…’

‘He’s upset, Ronnie.’

‘He’s my son.’

‘He’s upset and angry.’

‘Oh God. Come back for ten minutes.’

I thought of Hector. ‘Sorry, I have to go now.’

‘You don’t have to go, Iz.’

‘Yes, I do.’

I felt a wonderful freedom all at once, for I was no longer tied there. I had escaped and could leave without constraint or conscience. Even the sea could not keep me, much as I had once thought it could, for now I ached for the trees in my Dublin garden, the silence at night, the faces of strangers and the balm of solitude. I found Hector by the car.

‘Do you want to go to the pub?’ he asked. ‘I can drive you there, but I won’t go in.’

‘I want to go home. Now.’

It was not until we were coming in along Captain Penny’s Road that either of us spoke.

‘He looks like death,’ I said.

‘She’s left him.’

‘I don’t believe it.’

‘A couple of months ago. Dick Coad told me.’

‘Was Dick there?’

‘He was looking for you. He told me she’s run off to England with some old farm hand.’

I looked at Hector. ‘Not Beasley?’

‘Dick didn’t say.’

To laugh seemed the only response. ‘Oh, God, wait till Bibs hears. Poor Ronnie. What a fool.’

‘He’s up to his neck, according to Dick. Some old case in which he diddled someone. They’re taking him to court.’

‘That happened years ago!’

‘Dick said he could do jail,’ Hector said and slammed through the gears of the rented car. ‘And you ask me whether I’d like to come back here again? And be the son of a man who left his wife to live with a tart and who’s now all but in the clink because he’s a crook? Christ, I never want to set foot in this bloody place again.’