The Sea and the Silence (8 page)

As we met the foothills, I thought of how, had it not been for Hector, I might well have gone back for ten minutes, and then learned that Lucy was gone, and of the old trouble that now seemed set to put paid to Ronnie once and for all; and if I had, and had come within reach again of the sea, perhaps I might have thought my freedom to be an illusion and, once again, persuaded myself that my place was with a man who needed me.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

1970

Very slowly, I grew into the daily life of Dublin. The people had a quickness and agility to them, an eye for the main chance but a ready sense of humour that was different to the more open, easy-going inhabitants of a village like Sibrille. Yet Dublin was an amalgamation of little villages, being quite rapidly subsumed into a sprawling conurbation. I went to the cinema one week, to the theatre the next, and struck up polite friendships with the women of my own age who lived in that part of Ballsbridge. I learned bridge and found myself looking forward to our weekly tournaments.

One morning, about a year after Langley’s funeral, Rosa Santry rang. Like myself, Rosa was a solitary person and her days were spent in the Santry estate at Main. We spoke about her son, Kevin, who was going to be a solicitor, and about Hector, still with his regiment in Germany and now a captain.

‘A real Shaw,’ Rosa said.

I smiled, a private smile.

‘Iz, Ronnie’s not well,’ Rosa said.

‘Oh.’

‘It’s this wretched case. Jack says he’s gone to nothing.’

‘I no longer live with Ronnie.’

‘We just thought you should know.’

‘He is alone now because he has so chosen. What exactly does Jack mean?’

‘That he’s very thin, neglects his appearance. One would have to be concerned.’

‘I am concerned. But over the last twenty odd years, every time there has been a crisis in Ronnie’s life he has used me to get over it and then, when everything’s all right again, he’s resumed his old ways. Anyway, we’re in the middle of a legal separation. If I become involved with him he’s quite likely to use it against me.’

‘We thought you should know’, said Rosa.

Nevertheless, I rang Dick Coad. He told me of the impending case for fraud, as good as proven by all accounts, in which Ronnie, were he lucky, would have to sell the lighthouse in order to compensate his former client or, at the other end of the scale of fortune, would go to jail for a year or eighteen months. I asked why Ronnie didn’t settle ahead of the action so that the case could be withdrawn.

‘I understand that Beagles have implored him to, but apparently, he does not respond,’ Dick said.

‘Should I come down?’

A long pause reminded me of the meetings in the cramped upstairs office, reached by a winding stairs redolent of paper since the stocks for the stationery shop were heaped at the inner edges of the risers, and Dick’s desk of files and overflowing ashtrays, and the way, at that moment no doubt, his eyes were executing their separate patrols.

‘It is entirely up to you, of course, but I do not personally recommend it.’

A week later, I received a letter, the postmark Monument. The writing had been executed with a pen whose nib made gothic sweeps and curves of each letter.

Dear Mrs. Shaw

I write only because I know you to be a person of great compassion who has herself, over a lifetime, known much pain and suffering
.

I have always admired you, from the early days when the hounds met in Sibrille and you came out on foot. I look back on those good days, as I’m sure you do, and wonder how life could have changed so much, almost without our knowing it
.

I know you are aware that things have gone downhill in a big way for the poor Captain. I am also aware, of course, of your legal position and have hesitated greatly before putting pen to paper. Saint Paul once said in a letter to the Romans: ‘We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak.’ I think his words have given me courage to write to you. If you are strong enough now, then there is someone very weak who needs you to bear his infirmities
.

I won’t say more, other than that you are both in my daily prayers
.

Most sincerely
,

Jack O’Dea (Father) P.P
.

P.S. Please give my best wishes to Hector when you see him. JO’D
.

I walked in a park of swishing poplars, now in their autumn yellows, and felt the rain in my face, took off my scarf to let the weather at my hair and watched crows wheeling against the gathering dusk. I was being asked to go back in order to rescue Ronnie from the grave he had dug himself and now bestrode. The old me, a person of compassion, would have gone. And yet, I wondered had I it in me to be this new person, denying my saving hand to my husband. I needed to speak to Hector before I made my mind up. There was a number. I went home and found it, but before I could pick up the receiver, the telephone rang.

‘Mother, it’s me.’

‘Hector. I was just about to phone you.’

‘Are you all right?’

‘Well, yes. It’s wonderful to hear from you. Where are you?’

‘Listen, do you remember when we went down for Langley’s funeral, we had a chat and I mentioned a few things?’

We had talked about so many things, including Langley and Ronnie and how Hector could never live in Monument. About Hedley Raven. When Hector had returned to England, I had shivered at that memory, still clear but in miniature, as it were, a moment of shame perfectly preserved.

‘Of course I remember.’

‘Have you talked to anyone? I mean, have you discussed what I said?’

‘We talked about our personal lives, not something I would tell someone else, surely you know that.’

‘No, I’m talking about what I said about, you know, my job. Where I might be sent.’

‘You mean the…’

‘Yes. No names. But, yes, that is what I mean.’

‘Oh. So are you being sent?’

‘It’s all top secret and I’d be in one hell of a stew if anyone thought I’d been jabbering on. But the way things are going there at the moment, it seems likely.’

‘I’m expecting you home for Christmas. Here. In Dublin.’

‘Consider it done.’

‘Do keep safe. Hector?’

But he was gone, sucked back to wherever he was in Germany or England and I was left on my own, holding a telephone in Dublin and trying, once again, to come to terms with life’s monstrous ironies. And yet, through whatever process had taken place during our conversation, I was now quite resolved that I never wanted to see Ronnie again. Yet, in early November, on a midweek night just as I was about to go to bed, there came a knock on the front door. Had I been downstairs I would have gone directly to it, but as it was I went to the window of my bedroom and looked down. Despite his upturned collar and slouched hat, it could only have been him. He looked even more wretched than he had the last time I had seen him, over a year before. As he glanced up, I withdrew.

‘Iz?’

I sat, trembling, on my bed. He shouted up,

‘Iz, I’ve come up because we must talk. Iz!’

Up to that moment, I had thought I could dip in and out of my past, safe here in my house, but now, all at once, my independence seemed feeble. I was afraid of him.

‘Iz! You’re up there, I saw you. I want to come in! It’s raining!’

If I let him in and brought him up and eventually allowed him the warmth of my breast, and over the next six months gave him succour and shelter, he would as sure as the fall of night, when he had done with me, let me down again. I could not take any more wounding.

‘I’m going to kick this fucking door down if you don’t open it! Do you hear me, Iz?’

My hand was steady as I dialled the number. He was kicking now. Shouting. I spoke my name and address.

‘Iz! Open this fucking door!’

I began to dress. In the mirror of the dressing table, I saw someone of years ago. I had sworn not to torture myself about that, but that night of all nights it came back without remorse.

‘You needed me once, Iz, didn’t you? Did I let you stay outside with nowhere to go? Did I turn my back on you?’

I had seen people in cottages along the cliffs outside Sibrille, women feeding hens and leaning over their half doors, and I had plunged with envy. From the first day I had been driven down in Ronnie’s old, squeaky car, I had known that I was staking everything. Although I had lost much in that epic gamble, I had also won. Hector had grown up with a father.

‘I’m going to kill myself, Iz.’

A car’s engine and the sound of heavy shoes on my gravel. Men’s voices.

‘Come along out of that now!’

‘Take your fucking hands off me! She’s my wife!’

Scuffling noises. I heard an empty milk bottle topple over. I was glad Hector was gone from our lives; I was so thankful he was not there to see his father dragged away.

‘Iz!
Iz!
’

The guards came in wearing their caps and wrote things down, declined tea, and promised to bring him to the Monument train the next morning and put him on it. One of them, a man of silver hair, told me that he remembered my mother coming here thirty-five years before. He meant Peppy.

‘I’d see her out there herself gardening. A real lady, you could tell.’

I didn’t tell him that she was not my mother but the mother of the man he had just arrested.

‘I drove her home one day, you know?’

I looked at the guard, trying to make sense of his words. He chuckled.

‘Oh yes, she couldn’t drive, and the man who was sent up from Monument to take her home, a hackney man, had a seizure outside this very house, and they took him away in an ambulance. “You drive me,” she said, because we’d been called, and begod I did, all the way down to Sibrille in the hackney car and came home in the train.’

They went out through my hall with their torches and night sticks, the damp rising in a fine mist from their tunics.

‘Ring us, Ma’am, if he ever bothers you again.’

‘He won’t. Please don’t hurt him,’ I said.

Over the couple of weeks that followed I tried to equate the pain with that of childbirth, an inevitable human process that always preceded freedom and exultation; for however much I rationalised what I had decided or tried to concentrate on Christmas, I could not escape the cruel image of Ronnie dead. All my fears for him were on behalf of Hector, who I knew must still have kept a small place in his heart for the man he had so adored. That understanding decided me, not due to any meanness on my part where Ronnie was concerned, but because it was well past the time when Hector should have been told the truth.

As the days drew in, I hoped Ronnie would have the courage to end his own life rather than have to face the shame of a trial and prison, of impoverishment, of living off the charity of friends like the Santrys, for he would die of sadness from all that anyway; better if it came quick and on his own terms, which was how his life had been lived, however warped. My image was of him in the sea that day he had called out to me, his pink, bobbing head, and now in the sea again, but dead. I would not be hypocritical, I had decided. When the time came I would not go down to Monument and honour him dead where I had denied him alive.

The late November Dublin streets, although dark and wet, embraced me with a welcome anonymity. As I had used to do in Sibrille, I found a pub where I could sit with a book on an afternoon with a pot of tea, on the edge of voices and discussions; the evenings on which there was no bridge to play, I spent either in the RDS library or at home in my bedroom. As the year hurtled towards its nadir, so the lights of the shops grew ever brighter and the fires of the pubs warmer. As December turned, newspapers spoke of more trouble in Belfast, of bombs. On television, soldiers ran under sniper fire. A church burned to the ground. I wondered if Hector, were he posted there in the New Year, could refuse to go.

On the days leading up to December 7th, the burden of Ronnie’s fate became almost unbearable. Walking home along Herbert Park, I almost wished him to be hiding in the shadows or sitting in the dark cars parked along the road outside my house. In shops and pubs, I heard his voice, I was sure, or saw his face in a queue waiting for a bus. I could not shake myself free of him. I wished the news would come so that I could mourn him properly, on my own, and reclaim my life. This impending event led me to wonder how I could have such clear foresight about the end of someone else’s life, and whether that was wrong, or if I should or could do anything to save him. Several times I picked up the phone to ring people who might somehow be effective in heading off what was going to happen: Rosa, Dick, Father O’Dea. But then I realised as I replaced the phone, unused, that whatever I achieved by ringing them would be temporary, a mere delay, that the same agony would revisit me at Ronnie’s next convulsion, as it always had, and that my life, in the meantime, would remain in limbo.

I tried to focus on Christmas, making lists, constructing dates for Hector and myself. A play. A meal in a good restaurant. Drinks with a few new friends. I walked into Dublin on December 6th in an effort to connect myself with people and events and thus become part of them. Strings of lights crisscrossed Grafton Street. People stood at a large shop window, at one end of which sat a Santa Claus, at the other, rows of new television sets, all on an English station which was showing pictures of someplace in Northern Ireland where a man had been shot by a sniper at a distance of three-quarters of a mile. Reality, although brutal, was welcome, as if I had needed to scuff my hand against something rough in order to wake up. I bought wrapping paper and Christmas cards and went home and slept soundly.

I woke up excited by a decision I had come to overnight: I was going to buy a television set. I wondered what was involved and whether I was in time to have it installed by Christmas. I was putting away the things from breakfast when the doorbell rang. For some self-protective reason, I walked first into the front room and to the bay window from which the hall door could be seen. There stood the silver haired guard of some weeks before, this time cap beneath his arm, and a tall, grey-faced man in a suit.

My legs became unsteady at the knees, for despite the fact that I had envisaged the moment down to almost this very detail, I had not anticipated its physical effect. I began to cry, for somewhere in Ronnie there had been a person I had loved, but he had remained resolutely hidden for much of our life together. I was glad too for him, as I went into the hall, that it was over at last. My tears, as always, were for what Hector was going to feel, or if he would be able to weep. I would do so for both of us.