The Sea and the Silence Read online

  ‘Oh, it’ll be fine, don’t you worry,’ Ronnie said. ‘I remember feeling exactly the same before I left Gortbeg.’

  His mouth no longer needed the plastic support, but his face had set into a permanently skewed, almost fractured, look that, sometimes, in brief, unexpected moments, made him seem like a complete stranger.

  Hector said, ‘I don’t mind leaving home, it’s just I don’t want to go to England.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid, sir, that’s a pity, but you don’t have any more choice in the matter than I did. Sorry, old boy.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘I don’t wish to discuss it, Hector.’

  ‘Hector, why?’ I asked.

  ‘Only the real West Brits are still doing it, none of my friends are. They’re all going to school in Dublin.’

  ‘And learning gobbledygook,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘The people who still go come back to Ireland and have no friends here,’ Hector said. ‘A friend of mine in school has a sister who got married last year and she’d been to school in England. There wasn’t a single guest at the wedding who lived in Ireland.’

  ‘Thinking of getting married, are you old boy? Think carefully, if I was you,’ Ronnie drawled.

  He had the Anglo-Irish tendency not to engage the specific, to reduce an issue to its most trivial and to forestall the inevitable by refusing to recognise it.

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘You’ve always been happy up to now about going, Hector. Everything’s arranged. Isn’t it a bit late to say this?’ I asked.

  ‘Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of a discussion which may give rise to false hope,’ said Ronnie. ‘Leave it, shall we?’

  ‘I’m discussing something with Hector.’

  ‘Which I deem most unwise.’

  ‘Nonetheless, I’m still discussing it.’

  ‘I forbid it.’

  ‘You… what?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘Hector, please leave the room.’

  ‘If you’re discussing me, I want to be here,’ said Hector.

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’m not going.’

  ‘Leave the room!’

  I was trembling as the boy left, shaking his head.

  Ronnie looked at me with a supercilious expression. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘How dare you! Is that all you can offer him when something huge in his life arises? A patronising smirk? Thinking of getting married, are you, old boy? What kind of a father are you?’

  ‘He’s a child,’ Ronnie sighed, weary of the matter.

  ‘He’s highly intelligent. What’s wrong with what he said? What’s wrong with going to school in Ireland? There must be half a dozen suitable schools. Why does he absolutely have to go to England just because you did?’

  ‘And my father, and his father.’

  ‘So?’

  Ronnie’s eyes emptied. ‘Tradition may well have ended in your family with you, but here we still value it.’

  ‘What a despicable thing to say! You’re not capable of discussing the matter on its own merits without dragging in a personal attack!’

  ‘Does what I say not reflect the truth? Did you not ensure that everything your family held dear would end in one most unlovely debacle?’

  ‘You… pig!’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘I hate you, Ronnie.’

  ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘What on earth does my family matter when it comes to deciding where Hector should go to school? For that matter, why should the fact that you and his grandfather went to one school mean that Hector must now go there too? I think, in fact, he’s right. This is Ireland, our own country. Why must everything still relate to England? You’re out of touch.’

  ‘We’re talking not just about tradition, but about standards, about the type of person you want as your friend, about connections. You think he’ll get that in any school here?’

  ‘The point he makes is that he will. What connections did you make that are now so vitally important?’

  ‘More than you imagine,’ Ronnie said, getting up and looking at his watch. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.’

  ‘You’re ridiculous. We live here in a tiny lighthouse, we own less than one half of the land we did when I married you, we must watch how every penny is spent, you dart here and there like a mouse, trying to be the first to latch on to the newest person who comes into the area and has money. A lot of good going to school in England did you!’

  Ronnie turned, his misaligned face all at once white and set.

  ‘If you’d had any style, we mightn’t be as we are. You let us all down, every day, simply by being you.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  I caught up a cup and hurled it; it bounced from his shoulder and smashed on the floor.

  ‘Get out!’

  Ronnie stopped, then, eyes wild, he went to the stove, snatched up the pot of soup, and hurled it out through the open window into the sea. I picked up a vase and launched it for his head; although he ducked, it caught him high on his temple before disintegrating against the wall. Ronnie, panting, began to throw the furniture the same way as he had the soup. Picking up a heavy chair, I flung it at him, my strength a wonder. The chair caught him full square and he went down, winded. I picked up the breadboard, a generous piece of polished walnut, and went to stave in his head, but he caught my ankles and dragged hard so that I fell back and the board merely hit him in the chest. As if he had been interrupted in some serious task, Ronnie scrambled up and began to pitch every item of cutlery, glassware and crockery out the other kitchen window, many of them landing on his car that was parked below. I was bleeding from my mouth, yet I felt strangely empowered and elated. I picked up a pot stand and made a run at him. Ronnie went down again. I kicked him hard in the jaw. He winced and I wondered if I’d undone all the work of the unspeakable Mr Hedley Raven. I drew back again to kick harder.

  ‘Stop!’

  I froze.

  Hector was standing there.

  ‘You’ve both gone mad!’

  The boy’s eyes were huge. Each time I tried to take a breath, my chest screamed.

  ‘It’s all right, Hector,’ said Ronnie, getting up, wincing. ‘We were just airing our differences.’

  Hector looked from one of us to the other.

  ‘And have you stopped, now?’

  ‘Have we stopped, now?’ Ronnie asked, his teeth bared in pain.

  ‘Yes, we have stopped now,’ I panted.

  In the months that followed, when Hector had gone away to school in England and I was forced to confront my true feelings for my husband, I always came back to our fight that day and, when I did, I always smiled. Like a storm that clears the atmosphere, I had felt immeasurably the better of it. My head was clear and, for the first time in years, I was happy. Although the gaps between our lovemaking were irregular — in itself not unusual for a marriage of a dozen years, I had read — Ronnie’s stamina on these occasions was always short, something I could live with, but with which, I imagined, a succession of mistresses might be impatient. I tried to remember him as I had first met him, his nonchalance with the everyday things of life, his sense of humour and his easy charm. For despite everything, we still had times of sweetness together. They coincided in the main with Ronnie’s business catastrophes. Stripped of his tricks by worry and impending disaster, I saw another Ronnie, devoid of winning ways or the need to dissemble. My wish in those times was perverse: that we could always be like this, an aspiration which involved never-ending misfortune; but at least then I would have him alone, which is to say, a man without pretensions, in need of love, who stayed at home and close to me, who came out the cliffs for walks and who listened as well as spoke.

  ‘Hector’s getting on well.’

  We inched through a herd of port-bound cattle at the top of Captain Penny’s Road.
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  ‘He likes his school.’

  ‘Not right for an only child to be at home on his own. Needs company.’

  ‘His every move is a mirror of you.’

  ‘Boys are like that. I remember how it was with my own father. Wanted to be him.’

  We made our way forward as drovers beat and shouted.

  ‘May I say something?’ Ronnie asked. ‘I’d like to start again, you and me. From scratch. Go back to the very beginning. What do you say?’

  I could not conceal my frustration. ‘I don’t know, Ronnie. Really, I don’t.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

  A few nights later I was reading in bed when a knock came to the door of the lantern bay.

  ‘May I come in?’

  It was clear Ronnie had been drinking — not a common occurrence, but now manifested in a fixed, Langley-type grin. He sat on the side of my bed.

  ‘Big changes.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You know. Me drawing a wage, Langley peeing himself, Hector gone. Big, big changes.’

  ‘Change can be good.’

  Ronnie grinned. ‘You don’t change though. You just get more beautiful.’

  I felt my eyes brim. Ronnie sat on the bedside, then bent down and we kissed.

  ‘That was good,’ he said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘D’you want to know something? D’you know when I wanted you the most?’

  ‘I can’t imagine.’

  ‘When we fought… you know, before Hector went away. I thought you were magnificent. I couldn’t work out why we hadn’t done it before, got all the bad stuff out in the open. I wanted to come up that night, break down the door and ravage you. Sorry, but it’s the truth.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking, Ronnie.’

  He was now lying on the covers, stroking my neck.

  ‘Sometimes drink brings out the truth.’

  I looked at him, at his warm eyes, his still somehow inviting skin. With drink, he lacked the guile of the day-to-day Ronnie, so that all was left was a quite charming if tipsy, middle-aged man.

  ‘I don’t want to be hurt again, Ronnie.’

  ‘You won’t be, ever, I swear.’

  ‘I wish I could believe you.’

  ‘That’s all finished. I was a fool, I know I was, but I’ve changed. And apart from being even more beautiful, so have you, I think.’

  He had a tenacity at such moments lacking in all the other aspects of his life.

  ‘You are beautiful,’ he murmured, baring my shoulders and kissing them. ‘So bloody lovely.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  1963

  It was a time of change. Factories were built outside Monument, people acquired cars and houses began to appear on recently green fields, almost as far as the holy well on Captain Penny’s Road. When Hector stepped from the boat at Easter, it took me a moment to recognise him, six feet tall and twice as broad as I remembered. I saw girls on the wharf suck in their breaths.

  ‘Hector!’

  He smiled and held me.

  ‘You’re enormous!’

  ‘I’m ravenous.’

  ‘Your old mother had reckoned as much. Let’s go home.’

  We drove out Captain Penny’s Road and took the fork for Sibrille. The grass had that glistening, April newness. In some places, milk herds had just been let out after their winter’s confinement and, muddied and shed stained, bucked their way across green meadows.

  ‘How’s Dad?’

  ‘He’s at work.’

  ‘Is it going well?’

  ‘I’m not told.’

  ‘You said in your letter that there were some problems.’

  ‘There are always problems, Hector,’ I said as we breasted the last hill. We shouted together: ‘I see the sea!’

  I liked to stand and watch him as he ate, in silence, a serious business.

  ‘So good! God I was starving.’ He leant back, hands clasped. ‘You’re looking well, Mum.’

  ‘You should go and see your grandfather.’

  ‘I’ll see him when we go to Mass tomorrow.’

  ‘He doesn’t go any more, Hector. The priest comes once a month with Communion.’

  Hector made a surprised face. ‘How’s Stonely?’

  ‘I’ll tell you something funny, a man came to their door last week checking for dog licenses and Delaney answered it just as Stonely appeared around the side of the house. “What do you want?” Stonely asked him. “It’s all right, sir,” the man said, “your wife can look after me”.’

  Hector chuckled and took from his pocket a box of cigarettes and offered me one.

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I do?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘All the emphasis in school is on what we do when we leave next year,’ said Hector, puffing. ‘I’ve been talking to the careers bloke. Got on well with him. He’s given me lots to think about.’

  ‘Oh?’

  I had not prepared well for this moment, for although I could not bear to think of Hector coming back here and launching into a business career with Ronnie — something Ronnie had once or twice alluded to — neither could I bear the thought of him going away.

  ‘I think I’m going to join the army,’ Hector said.

  ‘Hector?’

  ‘Royal Green Jackets, Rifle Brigade, Granddad’s old regiment.’

  My breath lost its rhythm.

  ‘Chap in school has all the details, first I go to an officer’s training college, which is a bit like a university, then the world’s my oyster. See places like Australia, Belize, Hong Kong. I’ll be an officer.’

  I could not deal with all the cascading images.

  ‘That’s… wonderful. But you have another year before you make your mind up.’

  ‘I think I have made my mind up, Mum.’

  We all walked out the causeway that evening, to the drowned soldiers’ plaque, and watched the boats coming in on the tide.

  Ronnie said, ‘Beware the army. Pay you nothing, lure you in with cheap talk about faraway places, then throw you on the scrap heap when you’re thirty.’

  ‘Your father’s right, Hector,’ I said, swept by unexpected relief for Ronnie’s opinion.

  ‘Different in my day,’ Ronnie went on, ‘there was a war. And an empire. Stay at home, is my advice.’

  ‘With respect, there’s not an awful lot here… I mean, in Ireland,’ said Hector, suddenly pale.

  ‘They say this Common Market will lift all the boats,’ Ronnie said.

  ‘Do you think England will go in with a lot of Germans?’ Hector asked.

  ‘No, but Ireland can’t wait and if we do the money will all be for farmers. Think of what that will do to land. You could see farms going for five, six hundred pounds an acre.’

  ‘You’ll make a fortune, Dad.’

  ‘And you can be here helping me to make it. A lot better than getting your head blown off by some bloody fanatic.’

  They fished almost every day of that holiday, on the Thom in Main, from a boat off Sibrille and from the rocks outside our back door. I saw the ease in Ronnie, the untroubled slope of his shoulders as he walked side by side with Hector, their waders clomping. For those parts of the day when Ronnie had to go into Monument and I had Hector to myself, we chatted of other times in Sibrille, of Peppy, whom Hector had never really known, and of life’s enduring imperfections.

  ‘Mum, were you ever in love before?’

  ‘Before?’

  Hector was staring, as if my face had revealed something new of me.

  ‘Before Dad.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘I bet you were, weren’t you?’

  ‘Oh, maybe I thought I was.’

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘Just someone.’

  ‘We never talk about your family,’ Hector said. ‘I found an old photograph once, you when you were young with two women, one of them old and wearing a black
straw hat.’

  ‘Oh. My mother and my sister,’ I said and the day of that photo pierced me. ‘We had fifteen hundred acres.’

  ‘Gosh. What happened to it?’

  ‘It went the same way as Gortbeg in the end. It was seized and redistributed.’

  ‘What a shame.’

  ‘Actually, I think it was a good thing.’

  ‘Imagine what Dad would do now if he could get his hands on fifteen hundred acres. By the way, I’ve asked Lucy Toms to come to supper tonight, is that all right?’

  ‘Lucy? How old is she?’

  ‘She’s sixteen,’ Hector said and laughed. ‘She’s fun. She’s already had half a dozen boyfriends, according to Dad.’

  ‘The last time I saw her she was in a pram,’ I said

  ‘I’m going to tell her that,’ Hector said.

  Lucy Toms had dyed her hair bright red and she chain smoked. The afterthought of aged parents — her mother had been over fifty; Lucy’s birth had killed her, they said — she had, without discussion, left the girl’s school she had been sent to in Monument and lived, it seemed, beyond anyone’s control or censure. She was most attractive. I had cooked pork loin, Hector’s favourite meal, and had gone into town and bought a bottle of red wine for the occasion. After supper, the three of us went up and sat in the lantern bay. Ronnie had sent word that he would not be home until after ten: he was in Deilt closing a sale, a procedure that apparently involved drinking whiskey.

  ‘I’ve always wanted to live here,’ Lucy said drowsily. ‘My idea of heaven.’

  Hector, somewhat glassy eyed from the wine, sat in awe of such sophistication.

  ‘You live in a lovely house, Lucy,’ I said, for she did, albeit one that was crumbling, one of the few Georgian houses on this side of Monument and still standing on more than four hundred acres.

  ‘I hate it,’ Lucy said.

  Her legs were crossed and the shape of her thighs stood out through her thin cotton skirt.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘I just do, I hate it.’

  ‘Your father was born there. He’s worked very hard all his to maintain it.’

  ‘That’s why I hate it. It’s made him half mad.’