The Sea and the Silence Read online

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked, as we drove between fields of cattle.

  John Rafter was an almost comical reproduction of his father, and although he was not as neat or natty and always seemed in need of a shave, he had shaken off the obsequiousness that was part of Mr Rafter.

  ‘It’s a faction, Iz, just a faction,’ he said.

  I asked what he meant.

  ‘People will go to extremes in times of hardship and there’s a lot of hardship around at the minute. It’s just unfortunate that — you’ll excuse me — that there’s no able-bodied man in Longstead.’

  ‘My brother is fighting a war.’

  ‘There’s a faction out there that pays no heed to that at all. Forgive the language, but with only two women in your place, the bastards have nothing to fear or lose.’

  ‘Are we alone in being attacked like this?’

  ‘Not at all, it’s happening all over,’ John Rafter said, as if reassurance lay in widespread intimidation.

  ‘Where? I haven’t heard. Are the Penrose’s waking up to messages painted on their property? Are they getting rocks hurled through their windows?’

  John looked over at me kindly. ‘That’s a different set up, Iz. In that case, the faction would have too much to lose.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘There’s twenty men employed by the Penroses. Add in their families and you have a hundred people depending on a weekly wage. They have out-farms thirty miles from Grange. They have £100 given to heat the school. At Christmas, every Penrose cottage got a goose, a ham and six bottles of porter. Those people are much better off with the Penroses there than with trying to put them out.’

  We had arrived at a tiny railway station and for the second time that morning, I felt an overpowering urge to stay at home, but John was smiling at me.

  ‘You go on now and stop worrying. I’ll be here at twelve tomorrow to collect you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said and to my own great surprise, and I’m sure to his too, I leant over and kissed his grainy cheek.

  Within half an hour I had forgotten Longstead. The train plunged through tawny fields, through cooling stands of trees from which spouts of slate-grey pigeon erupted, by way of luminous lakes, by somnolent villages where ass-carts stood with their load of a single milk churn and youths with hurling sticks paused to wave. We crossed rivers with cattle on their banks and paddocks of sleek, indignant horses, and went by cottages with sleeping black cats on their steps and pigs out the back. I marvelled that the train could take in so much in its journey, that Ireland was not just one country but a collection of so many different places. I saw mountains whose flanks were covered in stands of timber and in whose high pleats the ivory-like flecks of cattle were imbedded. Across the carriage corridor, the masts of ships came into view.

  At the station, a jarvey took my bag and I boarded a horse-coach that surely hadn’t seen daylight for over a century but which now, with the Emergency, had been brought back into service. As we set out down the quayside, the hooves of the big Irish draught sang on the cobblestones. The tidal river, the power in its midstream, the way the quite large ships looked at its mercy, and the trawlers, all slapping up and down to the river’s command, excited me unaccountably. I had, I knew, spent every minute since I had left here waiting to come back.

  ‘The Commercial Hotel, Miss,’ said the jarvey, opening the hatch.

  I looked up and saw how the whole town seemed to be in a pile, houses where one expected sky, and seagulls perched on the utmost chimney pots.

  The hall of the hotel, floored in terracotta tiles, was dim. I went to a desk for my key and heard, from an inner bar, the swelling sound of drinking men. Ronnie had written to say that he would call in at three and take me out to see the sea at Sibrille. My bedroom overlooked the river and I sat for an hour, absorbing the contrast with what I was used to, the port activity and throngs of people in place of stillness; but after waiting another half an hour for Ronnie, I went out to explore.

  Never was there a moment that day that I did not love Monument. I was not to know then, of course, how it might be in rain, or storms, or, once every ten years or so, in snow, but, that day, sunlight infused every façade and pediment, every alleyway and wrought-iron gate, each set of steps disappearing, it seemed, between tight buttresses or facing gables on their way to the clouds. I had not been prepared for the size of the town, since the bulk of it lay concealed in successive terraces, behind old battlements, through gates that revealed tiny courtyards, in unsuspected squares from which the river could be made out far below one’s feet. Where did he live, I wondered? What did he do? And if he looked out of his window and saw me, would he remember that we had met, however briefly, once before?

  It was not Ronnie’s party at all but the annual supper dance of Monumentals rugby club. The banner of the club, white with tassels at both ends and the letters MONUMENTALS either side of a crouching lion, the club’s emblem, was slung high across the hotel’s dining room. On a raised platform to one end, four elderly men in dinner jackets were playing musical instruments. The room was crowded and already too warm.

  ‘You’ll like us down here,’ Ronnie said with his roguish smile as he held the tips of my fingers and then brought them to his lips. ‘We’re a mixed lot, not nearly as grand as the crowd you knock around with.’

  ‘I already do like you down here,’ I said.

  The band started up another tune and Ronnie led me out onto the little dance floor.

  ‘I’m sorry too about not turning up earlier,’ he said, ‘but the car broke down.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, I enjoyed my afternoon.’

  ‘I would have liked to have shown you the sea. People who haven’t seen it before gasp.’

  ‘I have, as I have told you more than once, seen the sea.’

  ‘But not this one, as I have told you.’

  I laughed. The band, stumbling through some of its faster routines, reminded me of an old, spluttering car, yet Ronnie danced well and we glided around.

  ‘You shine, you know,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘It’s hot in here.’

  ‘You are radiant, is what I mean.’

  ‘When are you off?’

  ‘I’m serious.’

  ‘There you go, headlong again. Tell me when you’re off.’

  ‘First thing tomorrow morning.’

  ‘Oh. I hadn’t realised.’

  ‘Happened all of a sudden. I go to barracks in Belfast tomorrow and enlist. With luck I’ll be shipping within a month.’

  ‘My brother is with the Royal Engineers. I wish he weren’t.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘There’s no one at home to run the place. We may lose it to the Land Commission.’

  ‘Join the club,’ Ronnie said.

  We swept by our table where a thin beef broth had already been served.

  ‘May I tell you something? Something important?’ Ronnie asked.

  ‘By all means.’

  ‘When I got your letter I jumped three feet in the air.’

  ‘You should be more careful.’

  ‘I couldn’t care tuppence if I’d broken my neck. Your being here has made this evening for me. I’m on the moon.’

  ‘I think they’re serving the main course,’ I said.

  We ate boiled bacon and cabbage and drank glasses of brown ale. The people at the table, to whom I had been introduced to but whose names I could not remember, chatted about rations and the war and what lay before Ronnie. Some of them asked me polite questions about Dublin, which they had been to once or twice, but mostly they were happy in their familiarity with one another, laughing about incidents from rugby matches and feats of daring of which I had no knowledge.

  I had been searching for him since I had come in, hoping that it would not be obvious, but ultimately not caring if it was. He was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Tom King, the man who had driven us home. Perhaps they didn’t live in Monument. Perhaps they had left
and gone to live elsewhere, in England, for example, where good jobs were to be had in war industries. Ships sailed from Monument to Wales every other day.

  Rice with custard was served. Ronnie kept getting up and dancing with women from other tables. Then I looked up and saw him. He had just come in and was standing at the door with Tom King. And the girl I had seen on the rugby field, her glossy dark hair now at her shoulders, was beside him.

  Ronnie went over to the door and had his back slapped. He kissed the girl’s cheek. She was tall, with strong, striking features. Her arm was linked through that of the man whose image I had woken to every day for weeks. Ronnie was laughing and saying, ‘She’s right over here.’

  I wanted to run. I had made a huge mistake.

  ‘This is Iz, the most beautiful woman in County Meath’, Ronnie boomed. ‘Tom you already know. May I introduce you to Frank and Alice Waters?’

  We shook hands. The girl looked me over, slowly, up and down. I wanted to die. I could scarcely bring myself to look at him. Ronnie had seized Alice and made for the dance floor.

  ‘This is the lady I drove all the way to the County Meath,’ Tom was saying.

  ‘I know,’ Frank said.

  ‘Would you like a drink, Iz?’ Tom asked.

  ‘No, thank you.’

  Tom made his way towards the bar and Frank sat in Ronnie’s chair. I saw everything blurred. Where before there had been light inside me, now there was dimness and dismay. It had never occurred to me that he might be married. He said, ‘We’ve met before.’

  ‘Have we? I don’t remember’.

  ‘You were down for our pipe-opener. When Ronnie got knocked out.’

  ‘Oh, that. I’d forgotten about that.’

  He smiled. ‘I haven’t. Ronnie talks about you non-stop.’

  ‘Non-stop? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I’m not surprised.’

  ‘What does he say, then?’

  ‘That you’re the youngest of several sisters, that you live on one of these enormous estates. That you live a charmed life.’

  ‘Ronnie knows very little about my life, ‘I said dismissively. ‘And our estate is by no means enormous.’

  ‘The fact that you live on any kind of an estate is important for Ronnie because the Shaws never stop talking about the enormous estate they used to own. But they lost it.’

  ‘Do you approve of that?’

  ‘Oh, no, I think it’s tragic,’ he said and the side of his mouth played with a little smile.

  He was trying to make me rise, which wasn’t difficult, because I was seething at myself for the assumptions I had made and the long journey I had undertaken for nothing.

  ‘I’m sure it was tragic for the Shaws,’ I said tightly.

  ‘Not half as tragic as it was for the hundreds of tenants who had been grubbing a living from Shaws for centuries,’ he said.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw his beautiful wife gliding around the floor with Ronnie and I felt profoundly foolish.

  ‘Every case is different,’ I said. ‘We, for example, have no tenants and yet we live in fear of our lives from people who throw rocks through our windows under cover of darkness.’

  He blew his cheeks out. ‘There’s no excuse for that, but look at it their way. I bet you live behind walls. These people have lived for hundreds of years outside those walls. But now, suddenly, it’s dawned on them that they run this country, they make the laws. And the people inside the walls, except for their land, have no power any more. They have no allies and, with respect, no meaning. What’s happening is inevitable.’

  On any normal day, I would have agreed with him wholeheartedly, but I hated myself so much at that moment that I wanted him too to despise me.

  ‘Are you some kind of politician, Mr Waters?’ I asked.

  I could see how clear were his eyes and how deeply one could delve into them.

  ‘No, just someone who cares about their country.’

  ‘It will all lead to ruin,’ I said, hearing Bella in my voice. ‘If you can’t distinguish between patriotism and theft, then I feel very sorry for you.’

  I was irking him, yet he struggled to keep composure.

  ‘You’re angry. Why?’

  ‘I’m not angry,’ I replied, furious with myself. ‘I just hate the politics of people who ignore the feelings and circumstances of others. What about law? What about fairness?’

  ‘Where’s the fairness in the fact that ninety-five percent of the wealth of this country is owned by three percent of the people?’ he asked and his cheeks all of a sudden blazed.

  ‘If I may say so’, I said, ‘that’s a half-baked philosophy that allows people who own nothing to take what isn’t theirs.’

  I was blazing too, but I didn’t care. I wanted to burn any question or hint of affection that might have existed, however ephemerally, between us. I wanted never to be in this place again. I wanted to go home.

  ‘I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,’ he said, getting up. ‘I hope you enjoy your time here.’

  I went out to the ladies room and stayed there for twenty minutes. I had been prepared to come and risk Ronnie’s advances in the hope of meeting the man I had dreamed of; and now I had met him, Frank Waters, and Alice, his wife, all I could wish for was that the time until the train left the next morning might somehow dissolve and that I could leave Monument. I was trembling with frustration. If I had taken the merest precaution of asking a simple question during the five hours it had taken Tom to drive us home the last time, I could have prevented this disaster. I think I had been afraid of Bella, who had commandeered the front of the car, afraid of her picking up my interest and her subsequent reaction, which would have been one of scorn. But it was no use blaming Bella. The thought that Frank might have sensed my interest and was amused by it added farther vinegar to the wound. I put my head into my hands and shrieked into my lap for my embarrassment.

  I emerged some time later, resolved: I would tell Ronnie I was ill and that I would have to retire early. As I made my way towards the dining room, I heard shouts. The band had stopped. A commotion was ensuing near the door and I realised that the rugby club’s banner had been torn down. A woman screamed. I heard a shout of Up the Republic! Half a dozen men or more were struggling to regain possession of their banner from a diminutive, bearded figure who had been wrestled to the floor. A man to the left of the ruck led with his foot. The circle around the fallen man closed.

  ‘Kill the little fucker!’

  ‘Dirty Shinner!’

  The sight was appalling, a man on the ground being kicked.

  ‘Get away from him!’ Alice Waters flew at the kicking men like an enraged hawk. ‘Stop it!’ she screamed.

  She clawed at them, trying to drag them off, but they scarcely noticed her. Blood appeared on the fallen man’s face, or what I could see of it. Some of his attackers fell over in their eagerness. Then, in a movement so fast that it was hard to follow, Frank Waters was in the thick of it, diving to the floor. It might have been a rugby match. Seconds later, he was in the centre of the crowd, a space cleared around him, panting, standing over the fallen man.

  ‘That’s enough!’

  ‘Fucking little republican bastard!’ swore one man. He drew back his foot again. Frank punched him square between the eyes and he went down.

  ‘I said, that’s enough!’ Frank shouted and faced them. ‘No one’s getting killed here unless I do it! Now get back! And you, get up, Stephen Duggan, and hand over our flag!’

  Slowly, the man got up, blood on his mouth and in his beard. His eyes were crazy.

  ‘God help you all that you have to play a British game in Monument,’ he said thickly, still clutching the banner.

  There was a threatening, collective roar. Frank snatched the flag from the man’s hands and threw it into the centre of the room. He put his arm around the man’s shoulders.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ he said.

  Although Tom King made a presentation of cufflinks in the s
hape of rugby balls to Ronnie, and Ronnie spoke of his chances of coming home from war in one piece being much greater than surviving a training session with Monumentals, a remark which everyone cheered, the mood was sombre, as if a basic fissure had opened and ugliness had been revealed. I saw Tom come in with Alice’s coat and then go out with her. Ronnie was being brought drinks at the bar, but I had declined all offers of alcohol and said that I was going to bed.

  ‘We’re not like you think we are.’

  Tom had come back in and was sitting beside me.

  ‘I’m not shocked, really. These things happen’, I said.

  ‘It was bad form’, he said. ‘It ruined the evening.’

  ‘Who was he?’ I asked.

  ‘Stephen Duggan. His father’s a blacksmith, they live in Balaklava. They’re decent people.’

  ‘And is Stephen decent?’

  ‘He’s too hot, but at least he’s got courage.’

  ‘To pull down a banner at a dance?’

  ‘He’s got opinions,’ Tom said quietly. ‘It’s dangerous at the moment to have opinions in Ireland. There’s emergency legislation, I’m sure you’re aware of it. The Special Branch shoot people like Stephen with republican sympathies. Men are dying in jail on hunger strike. Men are hanging for their beliefs.’

  ‘He seemed to go home when Mr Frank Waters told him to,’ I observed dryly. ‘I expect he’s a republican too’.

  ‘Frank and his sister grew up beside the Duggans,’ Tom said. ‘They’re childhood friends.’

  I felt my mouth go dry.

  ‘Frank and his sister?’

  ‘Frank and Alice, yes.’ Tom looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’

  I sat at the window of my bedroom, looking out over the night wharves, all but invisible because no lights were permitted due to the war, and at the occasional vessel slinking into port or downstream through the black folds of the river.