Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘Hector’s getting on well.’

We inched through a herd of port-bound cattle at the top of Captain Penny’s Road.

‘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.’

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.