The Sea and the Silence Read online

  Her face seemed to soften. ‘He did what he did as much out of concern for you as for his own safety. It was a hard decision, but Frank made it. He didn’t want both of your lives to be ruined.’

  ‘I don’t believe he said that,’ I said.

  ‘He did give me a message for you.’

  I wanted to stand up and run away from her, but I couldn’t. ‘What?’

  ‘He said to tell you to live your dream.’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  1944 – 45

  Winter entombed the midlands. Mother was so cold that her bed and wardrobe were moved downstairs to the little sitting room where a fire was kept going around the clock. Except for those in the kitchen, every window was permanently iced up and no water came from taps or flowed in the toilet. The electricity failed for days at a time and we reverted to the Longstead of my childhood, of trimming the wicks of oil lamps and of candles. The wireless no longer worked. Outside, wind whipped snow into massive drifts which threatened to further engulf the house. I kept warm most days by shovelling. Even if we’d had fuel for the car, we could not have gone anywhere, as whole sections of Meath and Kildare were cut off. John Rafter came up the avenue with provisions and the post; he sat in the kitchen and I made him tea. The whole country was prey to widespread hardship and trouble, he told me.

  ‘What kind of trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘You know, Iz,’ he said. ‘There’s some lads out there that’ll never stop until they get a bullet.’

  In the early days, I did not think that I could live. As Frank had introduced me to the meaning of love, so had I come to learn grief from him as well. I understood then what Mother was going through, for we had both lost someone we loved. Grief clung to me, and if moments of brief respite occurred, when the crushing reality resumed, it was always worse.

  I could not understand what had happened. Our plans had been so clear, the dangers we were escaping so manifest. I could only imagine that, in the end, Bella’s intervention had been decisive for him, that the sheer scale of what we would have to overcome seemed too much. And yet, up to then, I would have bet everything that no scale was too much for him, he who always emerged from the fiercest mệlée with the ball in his hands.

  But as the days towards Christmas wore on and I heard nothing from him, in order to preserve my own sanity and my dignity, I had to accept the possibility that I had made a mistake. I had been prepared to risk everything, but he had not. What lack this arose from in him, I couldn’t say, except that it must have come ultimately from a deficit of courage in the one area in which I would have sworn that he was peerless. And then I thought of his sister, and the crooked brace of prejudice in which her thoughts were formed, and I accepted with dismay that in the end, history had won out. It was cruel, for it called into question the value of every moment we had enjoyed.

  I set about forgetting him. My letter to Bella, which had never been sent but which for some reason I had kept, now seemed like part of someone else’s story. It was easier if I persuaded myself that, in truth, I had been lucky to escape. This did not liberate my soul, just deadened it.

  We had been invited to Mount Penrose for Christmas, but Mother was relieved when I suggested we stay at home. Still, Norman Penrose was one of the very few who made the journey up our avenue — on the pretext of checking the farm. He came in and stood in front of the fire and drank tea laced with whisky. I made sure that Mother stayed put on these occasions, for I would not have been able for Norman on his own. And yet, there was an inexorability about him that led me, despite myself, to go to bed some nights thinking the unthinkable.

  I considered running away, but there was still a war on and one could go nowhere. We had no money coming in and the bank had begun writing us stiff letters. The staff at Longstead, or what few remained, knew the dire situation, but at least in Longstead they had a roof over their heads and the produce, however disorganised, of a 1,500-acre farm. Although the war was as good as won, it still hung over us even on a good day, we who lived in a country that was meant to be at peace.

  A week after Christmas, John Rafter delivered a box of provisions which I brought to the kitchen and unpacked. The box was lined with newspaper. Something caught my eye. I removed the paper from the box and smoothed it out. I had to sit down to steady myself. A man and a woman stared out from their photographs beneath black headlines. The paper was three weeks old. The couple had been shot dead in an ambush in Tipperary by armed members of the detective bureau. Both had been members of the IRA. His name was Stephen Duggan. Hers was Alice Waters.

  As if a trowel had been taken to where my recent grief had been heeled in, now it was laid bare again without remorse. It was not just that death seemed so near, or so shocking, but that life itself suddenly seemed so trivial. Overwhelming, too, was the feeling that I was so utterly marginal to important events. I, who thought she had been at the centre of developments, learned of them only weeks in arrears from discarded newspapers.

  I wondered if Frank’s picture had appeared in some newspaper or other, and if he too was dead or just locked in a jail. He might well have been, for all we knew in Longstead. I grieved then, not just for him again, but for his sister and for Stephen Duggan, a man I had seen just once. I had been foolish to think that the wedge driven by centuries between our different classes could be removed by something as insubstantial as love.

  I thought much of love during those days and came to see it as just an ideal that men strove for, like truth or liberty, unattainable in any absolute sense. One man’s truth was another’s lie and what was freedom to one was slavery to the next. Life was about survival, about using what you had to best advantage and in not throwing away everything in a moment of madness.

  I came in at noon one day in mid-January and saw the pile of unopened post lying on the table in the breakfast room. I had begun collecting the bills and other pieces of business correspondence, since if they went through Mother’s hands they invariably disappeared, and letters concerning Daddy’s estate which a solicitor in Navan was dealing with. I sat down and began to slit open all the envelopes. When I lifted the last one, I saw the telegram. It lay there in its green buff with the utmost sinisterness. I realised a number of things at once: that Mother must have taken separate delivery of the telegram and decided not to open it; that she must then have hidden it beneath the pile of letters, knowing that I would discover it. I realised then too that the entire house was hushed. Listening. Waiting for me to come in here and do what Mother had been unable to do. What else do I remember? I’ll tell you what — the silence of death that lay everywhere, at whose centre I stood.

  We had no one to bury, for Allan was never found. The beautiful, clear-eyed boy who loved his horses and his fishing and who would come home and put everything to rights had been obliterated by a mine. I remember little of the next days, just that my body seemed like a well ever primed by grief. I wept without cease.

  At the memorial service, I heard but every other word from our rector, a tired-looking man who spoke of love and suffering and compassion. I wanted him to say how justice lacked in even the most fundamental sense, about the basic unfairness in nature and, if he existed at all, which I doubted, of God’s unremitting cruelty. God seemed to have us singled out for the most heartless of his games. But our game was now as good as over. I knew what had to be done.

  Bella, married and pregnant, arrived home with Nick. Harry came from London and Lolo drove down from Fermanagh with her husband. Our allies gathered from every corner of Ireland, some of whom I had never before seen and, in all likelihood, never would again, but they had been galvanised into action despite fuel rationing, floods and great distance, as if our shoring up was a sudden but vital campaign in the survival of our kind. They were of all ages and frequently bizarre in appearance, centuries mattering little for changes in dress or deportment, and almost all of them were determined to display that shining, outward resilience and imperviousness to grief which is the traditional hallma
rk of the colonist. From Monument came the Shaws, Ronnie’s parents, a lopsided, always half-smiling man and a big, angular woman who introduced herself as Peppy.

  ‘Ronnie knows, dear. He’s devastated,’ she said and kissed my cheek, although it was the freezing cold tip of her big nose that I felt most. ‘He wants you to know you’re in his thoughts constantly.’

  ‘I’m glad he’s well,’ I said.

  ‘Ronnie is like his father, he’ll enjoy himself wherever he goes, even during a war,’ she said. ‘Do you know that when his regiment shipped out for France, he brought two sets of hunting boots, trees intact?’

  I smiled.

  ‘Ronnie was right,’ Peppy said. ‘You’re divine.’

  ‘How is… Monument?’ I asked, unable to stop myself.

  Peppy Shaw’s pale eyes were flecked at their centres with shards of knowing grey.

  ‘Some people don’t seem to understand that their particular war has long been won,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s no need of guns and bullets. They who once ruled are finished, by which I mean “we”. This is the country of young Ireland now and time is all that is needed for it to come of age.’

  Our tragedy had cut through local politics too, it seemed, for men from all parties assembled at our church, and even though it was forbidden by their own religion, many of them came inside. Later, the house was thronged and warm and people shouted to be heard. Mother sat, mute, as though winded by a fall, the Misses Carr, disconcerting replicas, either side of her.

  ‘Iz, we must talk.’

  One would have liked to say how pregnancy suited Bella, how she had bloomed; alas, her bump looked more like an impediment which she was powerless to navigate. We went upstairs to what was still referred to as Bella’s bedroom. Lolo, poor, dear Lolo, had begun to resemble Daddy in the way she scowled, closed the door. Bella said, ‘He has been mentioned in dispatches.’

  ‘That’s a huge thing,’ Harry said. ‘It’s like a decoration’.

  How superfluous the term decoration, I thought.

  ‘Mother has no idea,’ Lolo said.

  ‘I think she understands more than all of us,’ I said.

  Harry stood, hands in his pockets, looking out the bedroom window. ‘I saw you speaking to Rafter,’ he said to Bella.

  ‘Mr Rafter is the best friend we have,’ Bella said, avoiding my amused look. ‘He has told me exactly where we stand. He says it’s now a matter of weeks rather than months. Unless there are developments.’

  ‘I thought the fact they had all come to pay their respects rather meant that we had escaped all that,’ Lolo said.

  ‘Just means they were using the opportunity to sneak a look at their new property,’ said Bella dryly.

  ‘What developments has Rafter in mind?’ Harry enquired.

  Bella lifted her chin. ‘Longstead is lost unless Iz marries Norman Penrose.’

  They turned as one to me, but I had made my mind up and was ready for them. I just smiled.

  ‘The Penroses can do no wrong in these people’s eyes,’ Bella said. ‘If Iz marries Norman, then Longstead will not be touched. The Land Commission will back off. Mr Rafter says he can as good as guarantee that that is what will happen.’

  They all looked to me again.

  ‘Do you want to marry Norman, Iz?’ asked Lolo.

  ‘I’ll marry him,’ I said.

  Harry’s breath came out in a long, relieved hiss. ‘Well, were it not for the occasion, I’d suggest we drink champagne,’ he grinned.

  ‘Thank God. I’ll tell Rafter,’ Bella said.

  They came and kissed me in turn. Bella and I left the bedroom last.

  ‘By the way, on the matter of you know who…’ she began.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Thank God Nick made inquiries. It seems he is on a list of the most wanted men in Ireland,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t wish to discuss it.’

  ‘He’s got a price on his head, you know.’

  ‘I don’t wish to discuss it!’ I screamed and left her there, her front jutting out like an anthill.

  My engagement to Norman did not have the effect of stopping the land agitation completely. Some local people who owed nothing to the Penroses felt that a great prize was being snatched from them and continued to lobby and to hold meetings and to demand action from their local representatives.

  Although the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, I felt as if I were in my own war where survival depended on hard decisions and compromises. I saw Norman at least every Sunday, either when Mother and I went for luncheon to Mount Penrose, or when Norman and his father came to us. I wore an engagement ring that had been his mother’s and we went for walks, during which he spoke in steady tones about his ambitions and plans for Longstead. He had placed a notice announcing our engagement in the national newspapers. He had planned an engagement party, the first party in Mount Penrose in fifty years, he said. Although we had not yet been intimate, Norman seemed to already regard me as his wife.

  I spent most of February clearing the detritus of winter from the shrubberies and digging beds in preparation for spring vegetables. I worked often without pause for four or five hours, as if afraid that stopping would give me time to think. I organised the annual spring clean of Longstead, the most thorough in memory, and helped carry out carpets and rugs on to the gravel and went back in to inspect, with dismay, the gaping holes in our floors where rot had thrived uninterrupted for fifty years. Norman sent over a carpenter and within two weeks new timbers had been laid and varnished.

  ‘These windows are all beyond repair,’ Norman said. ‘We’ll have to replace them.’

  I did not protest. It seemed easier just to let him get on with it.

  The party was held in Mount Penrose on a Saturday in late February, when gales ripped the length of Ireland. Bella and Nick arrived home, Bella now hugely pregnant and exhausted from a nine-hour sea crossing. They were well suited, Nick and Bella, she with her imperious demeanour and he with the kind of icy authority that sits on men who see their wishes enacted as laws. Mother’s stated intentions about her repatriation to Yorkshire were ignored by Bella, who advised that they were nothing more but the onset of dotage.

  On the evening of the party, I put on a dress that had been made for me in Dublin and would eventually be paid for out of Daddy’s meagre estate. It was silk crepe, the colour of sunset, and fell from beneath a bow at the waist in tiers. The neck was square cut and the top half broken only by a single row of buttons. Nick drew in his breath when I came downstairs.

  ‘You look absolutely ravishing,’ he said and kissed my cheek.

  We left Mother playing whist with Mrs Rainbow and set out in John Rafter’s van for Grange. As gusts of wind struck the little vehicle and tried to fling it off the road, I made lists in my head of the things I would prefer to be doing rather than going to my engagement party. Halfway to Grange, I lost count and abandoned the exercise.

  Mount Penrose was a square, severe house and had been built in the mid-nineteenth century when the fashion must have been for oak: staircases, doors, window reveals, floors, fireplaces and skirting boards all brooded the provenance of dark forests. I thought of our own home, ramshackle in comparison, yet in its own way comfortable. The Penroses had installed an orchestra and although the country was still on war rations, one hundred people would eat roast beef and drink champagne. Norman met me at the door and I took his arm and we went in. A man with a black moustache came towards us, limping.

  ‘I now know I was wrong,’ he said. ‘You are not just the most beautiful woman in Meath, but in Ireland.’

  ‘Ronnie!’ I laughed and he hugged me. ‘I thought you were somewhere in France!’

  ‘Got in the way of a Gerry bullet, I’m afraid,’ Ronnie said, ‘but they didn’t realise they were dealing with a Monumentals man.’

  He grinned and the gap between his front teeth appeared and made me laugh out loud. Perhaps it was the moustache, but he seemed older and in the process m
ore dignified. I wanted to ask what had become of Frank, but Bella and Nick were hovering. Then I saw Ronnie’s cufflinks in the shape of rugby balls and the thought of the evening on which he had been presented with them made me plunge.

  Except for the beginning of war, nothing is headier than the prospect of its ending: people spoke of curtailments being suspended in a month, of travel restrictions being abolished and of sons coming home. As the band struck up, Stanley Penrose swung me around the floor of his hall, his white whiskers tickling my chin, and confidently predicted that I would give him at least four grandchildren. He pressed me on the date for the wedding, but when I was evasive showed a flash of the steel with which he had made his fortune.

  ‘You’re not going to go on playing the monkey with the poor lad, are ye now?’ he asked.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘You know what I mean, Miss.’

  I excused myself and went and locked myself into the Penrose’s toilet. I saw myself in the gilt-framed mirror, my lovely dress and my anxious face. I will do this, I told myself, and went back out.

  I danced with twenty men and each one vied with his predecessor to assure me of my destined happiness. I was terrified: of Stanley Penrose, of these people, this house. I looked around for Ronnie, but each time I saw him, I was grabbed anew and steered for the music.

  Norman and I sat down with Bella and Nick for supper. My future husband, although he would never entirely shed his solemn demeanour, even on an evening such as this, nonetheless was lighter than I had ever seen him. I tried to let go and to imagine the fine life that awaited me here, the wealth and the certainty. Norman’s father called the party to order and proposed our toast, which involved him making a long and serious speech about land agitation, during which everyone shouted Hear! Hear! and nodded their heads grimly as their host spoke of the shortcomings of the government, the injustice of the law and the brink of anarchy on which he assured us we were all poised. Norman replied briefly and then everyone stood up and applauded me. Led by Norman to the centre of the floor, we danced for them in the house of which I would soon be mistress and all I could think of was the dance in the hotel in Monument.