The Sea and the Silence (9 page)

‘Ah, Mrs Shaw.’

He was a kind man with big warm hands. I held on to his arm.

‘Where would you like to sit, Ma’am?’

I was crying and shaking my head. We sat together, me and the guard, and he held my hands in his.

‘So you know, Ma’am?’

I nodded. ‘I’ve known for weeks.’

I saw the guard and the other man exchange glances.

‘I can stay here as long as you want,’ the guard said. ‘You must have great memories.’

I laughed. ‘Some. Some not so great.’

‘I know, I know.’

‘How… How did..?’

‘Instantly,’ said the other man, pulling over a chair. Something about the way he spoke. He introduced himself, but I heard nothing. He said, ‘He didn’t suffer.’

‘He’s with God now, Ma’am,’ said the guard. ‘Hector is with God.’

‘Ronnie, I said. ‘Hector is our son.’

The men looked at one another.

‘Ma’am,’ said the guard, ‘Hector has been killed in Belfast.’

How slow the mind, I often thought in the months after, but how quick the heart. I began to scream, even as I knew what they were telling me was impossible. The other man’s voice, English, the words ‘military intelligence’. I ran upstairs to my bedroom and locked the door because I thought they were trying to kill me. I screamed. As long as I screamed, I could not hear.

I can’t say how it came about, but the evening of that day arrived without time intervening. My house was so filled with old friends that I thought I was back in Monument. Dick Coad, Father O’Dea. The Santrys. Bibs Toms. And neighbours from the other houses in the road who brought food and a chaplain of some sort who seemed to be connected with the British Army, who sat trying to get it through to me: he spoke of intelligence, of heroes and cowards. Of Hector’s background, which was why he had volunteered for military intelligence. The first British officer to be murdered in Ulster.

History had been stood upside-down and hung there, gloating. The faces of dead men, blood on their lips and in their nostrils, and a game played on a huge expanse, assailed me.

‘I’ve lost him,’ I said.

Rosa held my hands in hers. She was warm and kind.

‘You must find him, Iz. You must bring him back.’

People came and went continuously and my head was spinning. And then Father O’Dea, gently, my sorrow in his eyes, said, ‘Iz, love, poor Ronnie’s here.’

That day saw the second great hinging of my life. As they led him in, I could see the truth of the saying that no matter how wretched you are, there is someone, somewhere, even less fortunate. For there were men far more despicable in the world than Ronnie Shaw, but few more pitiful.

‘I had nowhere else to go.’

‘I know, Ronnie.’

He knelt at my feet and wept, his sobs unending, as if all that was in him must try and leave him by his eyes. He made me calm. He looked at me now and then from the face of a stranger, not an outsider, just someone I had not seen before. Even as the shadows of evening stole from the open door to the hall across the living room and the people from the nearby houses began to go home and the murmurings from all over the house ceased, Ronnie cried. I kept thinking how sad it would be for Hector to see his father like this. It was Dick Coad who helped him up, at last, and brought him out and down the front steps and put him in a car to drive him home to Monument.

INTERLUDE

Dick Coad sat back from his desk, his memory racing. The journey home from Dublin on the day after Hector’s death had been the loneliest of his life. He had not believed before that he could love her more than he already did. He had been wrong. If he had only had the courage when she had moved to Dublin to follow her, to attend to her every need, to be the friend she relied on most — the thought had pursued him for years. To give her love. ‘My lovely Dick Coad’. The image of the years that they might then have had together seared Dick. What had held him back? Lack of nerve, granted. But was there not something more? Fear of what he did not know?

Dick looked at the second package on his desk. Down on the quayside, out of sight, the hooter of the mud dredger sounded. He had heard the rumours over the early years, of course, the whole town had been alive with them, could speak of little else. Many seemed to think her coming to live in Sibrille — almost amongst them, as it were — was brazen and outrageous. Except for her shopping trips, she was rarely seen, had few friends. It was as if, even at twenty-three, she had lived most of her life before she ever came to Monument. Something she never spoke of, nor indeed had Ronnie, although he must have known.

Picking up the paperknife, Dick slit the wrapping paper.

2

I Z

CHAPTER TWELVE

1943

She came towards me, part of the sunlight, her rich, wavy hair covering her shoulders, and I wondered how anyone could be so beautiful. I was in awe of her. So was everyone in Longstead.

‘Iz? You’ve… done something!’ She stood Bill, the old horse she rode, on the gravel drive. ‘What have you done?’

‘Do you like it?’

‘Oh, God, you’ve cut it all off!’ Bella cried. ‘Turn around!’

I saw my reflection in the French windows as I turned. The sun felt hot on my newly-bared neck.

‘You look like a boy!’ Bella cried as she trotted the horse away in precise crunches. ‘My sister is a boy!’

She would be twenty-three that August and she had come home from London for her party. I was twenty-one. I’d cut my hair short the week before when I’d lain upstairs in bed, drenched in sweat, shivering with a fever. My mother, Violet, made me recite lists to calm my swirling head. The prime ministers of England, the kings and queens, Dublin streets with churches. Bus numbers, characters from Shakespeare.

‘I used marshal lists like soldiers when I was a child,’ she told me. ‘Had it not been for lists, I would have lost my mind.’

When my fever broke, my voice had changed. My mother said I sounded like the breeze that blew in March across the lake at Longstead.

I knew that Bella’s party would be our last as a family, since it was most unlikely that our father would live until my turn came; on the other hand, one never knew. Daddy had been poorly for as long as I could remember. A fall from a horse in his twenties, an undiagnosed ruptured lung, and now his heart. Mother had him carried everywhere since he seldom had the energy to walk. But he had once been young and well and had made the money to buy Longstead from trading in corn. He could still be witty and often retold the times of his encounters with farmers and shippers in Canada and the American Midwest and of the vast potential of Australia, where he had once tended sheep on horseback. Despite his illness, I could now and then catch glimpses of the younger man, a charming companion, a person of intelligence and ambition who had seen much of the world and had loved it.

However, by the time I reached twenty-one, all his business interests had been sold or had otherwise drained away. My brother, Harry, worked in England for a shipping broker, and Allan, the only one interested in farming, had joined the British Army in 1939. Outside our walls, one heard of similar estates as ours being taken over by the Land Commission and carved up between the local farmers who were agitating for more ground. Only the thriving estates would survive, I had heard it said, and the truth was that Longstead, like my father, was slowly dying. Our land was worked-out, our ditches blocked, our fences untended and in our once-rich meadows lay the rotted hay of former seasons.

My mother drove the Ford Victoria down the avenue and onto the public road, which our beeches overhung for a mile. I puffed alight her cigarette and delivered it over, then lit one for myself.

‘Did I remember to tell Mrs Rainbow that Daddy would like her bean soup at one?’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘I’m losing my mind. I don’t remember.

Regardless of season, Mother always went about in old corduroy trousers, flannel shirts, thick pullovers and a hat. She had grown up in the Yorkshire Dales which, she told me, she missed a little every day. From a distance she looked like a scarecrow.

‘You told her, Mother.’

‘My poor head. Last night I had to get up twice and go downstairs to make sure all the lights had been put out.’

Every day, she painted with watercolours; anything that took her from her easel did so with pain. In a horse-drawn trap, she set out as soon after breakfast as she could, and, during the summer, often did not come back until supper-time. On the very worst of mid-winter days, she withdrew to the summerhouse and stayed there until her fingers went numb.

‘No one but me ever thinks of these things. Then we get the bills and must pay for everyone’s forgetfulness.’

‘Are we very short of money?’

‘We are drifting, Iz.’

‘Perhaps I should get a job.’

‘Perhaps we all should.’

My mother sounded the horn and swerved around a cartload of hay being drawn by a horse.

‘Until Allan comes home and takes things in hand, we shall continue to drift. Like a ship without a captain.’

‘What if he decides not to come home?’

Mother’s reply was emphatic. ‘Allan will come home. He’ll come home for his horses and his fishing.’

‘But what if he doesn’t?’

She looked at me. Her hat, one of black straw, was fixed by a gigantic silver pin.

‘Then Bella or you will have to find a suitable husband.’

I burst out laughing. ‘What a thing to say!’

‘I was married at nineteen.’

We pulled in by the grocery store in Tirmon village.

‘When I marry it will be for love,’ I said.

Mr Rafter’s shop supplied Longstead with all its needs. These included the food which we did not ourselves produce, our drink, although we drank modestly, feed for horses and cattle, rubber boots, thick socks, flannel shirts, jackets, raincoats, curtain material, bed sheets and pillow cases, and all the trappings needed to keep a fifteen-hundred acre enterprise, however faltering, on the go. Except for Sundays, no day went by without a transaction with Mr Rafter. He, in turn, played the central role in the sale of Longstead’s beef, lamb and mutton, hay and milk. In a small room at home between the servants’ hall and the main staircase, my father and Mr Rafter spent hours together every other month, following which Mr Rafter would emerge, his hands held in fists at the level of his waistcoat, and say to whosoever of us was there to see him out, ‘I see a definite improvement.’

If money ever changed hands, I was not aware of it.

My mother regarded Mr Rafter’s premises as an extension of Longstead; Mr Rafter always managed to be there to open the door when Mother arrived and to take her list.

‘Mr Rafter.’

‘Good morning, Mrs Seston. Miss.’

The grocer’s eyes were upcurved and naturally conspiratorial. In his mid-fifties, shaped like a sack of grain and with dark hair receding from a shining tan scalp, Mr Rafter was identified with party politics.

‘How’s the boss?’

‘In good form, thank you, although he worries about the war.’

‘War or no war, it’s not a bad time of the year, if he could get out, although there was a breeze yesterday that would cut the backbone off you.’

His words floated behind Mother’s inbound steps. Men in brown dustcoats attended behind counters as we forged through the sudden collision of aromas in the elongated shop. Smoked ham gave way to coffee which yielded in turn to timber, polish, rope, cured lamb fleece, rubber.

‘Mr Rafter, we are having some people in.’ Mother would never use the word ‘party’. ‘Here is the list. We require champagne.’

‘Certainly.’

‘And candles. Have I written down candles? I’m losing my mind these days.’

Mr Rafter consulted the scrap of paper which Mother had taken all of two minutes to draw up before we had left.

‘I don’t see…’ The grocer frowned, slow to be the one to suggest an omission. ‘How many candles might be required?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea, I simply remember the last occasion, before the electricity, Lolo’s birthday. Every room must have needed two dozen. How many rooms are there? Iz! Do I have to do this
completely
on my own?’

This was the first I had heard of candles. I made a rough calculation.

‘I’ll put down for a gross of the good ones, just to be sure,’ said Mr Rafter, writing with a pencil into a reassuringly permanent order book.

Mother was pulling vaguely at the corners of a bolt of cloth.

‘Italian, silk and wool. The Pope himself has his shirts made from it. Fifteen shillings a yard, ma’m,’ said Mr Rafter.

I could see Mother’s interest retreat before the price. Too much money, although money was something she never discussed with Mr Rafter. She looked at him as if he had said something that had puzzled her.

‘We need bunting,’ she said.

‘Bunting,’ Mr Rafter repeated, but his pencil remained still.

‘In the porch’, said Mother.

It was not easy to wrong foot Mr Rafter.

‘Coloured paper streamers,’ I said and Mr Rafter said
Ah
and wrote.

‘And huge quantities of bread for sandwiches,’ Mother said, ‘isn’t that all?

She had now reached the rear door to the yard of the premises where oats and meal were stored. Her eyes took in shelves, as if checking for change or movement since her last visit; she turned and at a quickened pace retraced her steps by way of sugar bins and tea chests and labelled drawers piled to the roof.

‘And some staff to hand out, as you so kindly provided before, and teapots. As I remember, we must have borrowed them from you or else, if we did buy them, then we’ve lost them, which I would imagine is impossible, you can’t lose twenty teapots, although nothing would surprise me any more.’

She halted.

‘You arranged the band,’ Mr Rafter.

‘Indeed I did, Ma’am, I collected them off the train myself.’

‘Are they still..?’

‘Going strong. I seem to remember they were to everyone’s satisfaction.’

‘They seemed perfectly adequate. Very well, if you could please…’

‘I’ll see to it this morning.’

We had reached the door where one of the young men in brown coats had leapt forward to hold it open.

‘Put down fish paste’, Mother said.

‘Fish paste.’ Mr Rafter wrote in solemn fashion. ‘And the champagne?’

‘Just make sure it’s good.’

‘Of course’, said Mr Rafter, stepping out after us, ‘but will there be much required?’

Mother stared at the shopkeeper. Part of her expected Mr Rafter to know the answer to such a question without his having to ask. We did not entertain very often, but when we did, he should have known that it followed an invariable pattern. At the same time, she considered the question as verging on the impertinent and was not prepared to discuss with a grocer outside his shop how many people we were having in or how much champagne they might drink. And finally, I knew — and knew that Mr Rafter also knew — that Mother had not until that moment attempted to work out how many people might, in fact, be coming to Bella’s party.

‘Sufficient, Mr Rafter,’ she said and swept towards our car, me hurrying behind her.

I had been to school in Wales. In a tradition initiated by my sister, Lolo, and continued by Bella, three times a year I had boarded the mail boat and sailed to Holyhead. I was meant to have gone on after school, as Bella had, to Paris and Geneva, where one learned to cook and to be in all ways perfect, but there was a war and so I had attended an academy for those purposes in Dublin. My brothers too had been to a minor English public school, with the result, probably intended, that none of us knew very many of the local people around Tirmon, as if Tirmon was not the place we lived but merely dropped in to during holidays. This structured aloofness bound Anglo-Irish society to itself; by necessity we reached to the far corners of Ireland for our friends, as if we Anglo-Irish were all related by virtue of ascendancy, inter-marriage and religion, and above all by our resolute non-Irishness. If any one thing defined us, that was it. We knew what we were not, and every action and attitude flowed from this fact. We had suffered the onset of Irish independence by, in the main, ignoring it. That we no longer controlled the country in which we lived or that we had been allowed up to now to continue as before seemed to have occurred to no one. We were, of course, not English either, a more awkward truth. The native Irish had only us to go on as an example of Englishness and we gave full value for money in playing the part; but when we went to England or to Wales, we understood that to the English or the Welsh we were Irish. We were, in fact, part of a new race, born of successive plantations from the Middle Ages, but a race that had, by even the most modest standards, failed. We had failed to keep the land we had been sent to settle. Failed to find a way of living with the people we had been sent to rule.

On the morning of the big day, Mother, having seen my father installed in the morning room, took her easel, pallet and paints and disappeared in her pony trap. She would not return, I knew, until evening, for like a child that closes its eyes to hide from monsters, once out of sight of all the bustle and preparation, she would feel safe. Harry, who had come home the day before, was outside, helping to haul up a tent, as Mr Rafter and relays of his men carried in hampers. Harry had always been the one who had made the jokes and livened up the atmosphere at meal times and made Daddy laugh.

‘I’ve never seen so much food,’ I said.

Bella, in a long dress of cool, baggy sleeves, dragged on her cigarette. She said, ‘It will all go to the pigs tomorrow, like the last time.’

‘Better than being stuck for enough.’

‘Miss Practical. Perhaps you might be practical enough to pour the tea.’

We sat in what was called the sunroom, a lean-to at the gable of the house, whose sun was about to be blotted out by the rising tent.

‘By the way…’

Bella drew her legs in beneath her and reached for her cup.

‘I met Norman last night and he was very keen to know that you would be here tonight.’

‘Really.’

‘Miss Ice.
Really
. Well yes, he was,
really
. You’re such a little fool.’

Norman Penrose lived with his father on a thriving estate outside the village of Grange, seven miles distant. In his early thirties, charming and unfailingly courteous in his offers in the problems of Longstead, he had always been generous and helpful. And yet, for all his excellent points, Norman made my flesh crawl.

‘I’m very sorry, Bella,’ I said thinly. ‘I didn’t realise that you were so touchy about Norman. Maybe it’s you he’s really after.’

Bella’s face assumed a slow, insouciant smile. ‘I don’t think so, darling. My taste in men is somewhat different.’

‘You mean married.’

Bella ran out her tongue and played it on the crown of her upper lip. ‘Why not?’