Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

I felt ashamed for not spending more time with Langley — Ronnie had not been to see him since Christmas — but the County Home was a grim ordeal for visitors, stinking as it did of cheap food and bladder. Yet to those like Langley, clinging with grim determination to three meals a day and life, it was a home. I passed the gates and prayed that his merciful release would not be too much longer. Dick Coad was not in. His sister who sold stationery from the shop downstairs had no idea where he was.

‘Will it ever stop?’ she asked as we stood in her shop looking out at the rain.

It was too wet to shop and, anyway, I had no money. With wipers whirring, I drove out on to Long Quay, already under an inch of water. Through a lapping tide, I marvelled at how a town that a week ago had spoken of water rationing now resembled Venice. Short of the Commercial Hotel, a large woman, soaked, was lugging along a heavy suitcase. As I passed, she turned.

‘Bibs?’

Hair was stuck to Bibs Toms’s big cheeks.

‘Christ,’ she said as she got in, ‘I had forgotten quite how hopeless they are in this town’.

‘What a nice surprise.’

‘I must have waited at the station for three-quarters of an hour for a taxi that never came.’

‘I’ll bring you home.’

Steam rose from Bibs as we met open country and the rain eased.

‘This is Langley’s old car, isn’t it? Is he still..?’

‘Yes. But he might as well be dead, poor man.’

‘He was my hero as a child. No one crossed country like old Captain Shaw.’

‘You must like Dublin. I heard you have a very good job.’

‘Well, a job.’ Bibs snorted and squeezed her hair into a queue. ‘I work in a shop, if you must know. We sell wool.’

‘I’m sure it’s interesting.’

‘It’s dreadful.’ Then Bibs smiled. ‘But on Saturday afternoons, I take a bus to Rathfarnham and ride out hunters for a businessman.’

‘So you’ve two jobs, that’s clever.’

‘Oh, I don’t charge him, I just do it for the love.’

Exactly half way to Sibrille was Toms Cross. The right-hand road doubled back for more than two miles before the first acres of the Toms’s land was reached.

‘We had the best hunt in memory from a meet here,’ Bibs said. ‘The fox ran all the way to Eillne, can you believe.’

‘How often do you come home?’

‘Not a lot. It’s too expensive. Besides, I have my horses in Dublin now.’

‘Your sister’s a pretty girl,’ I said as the road wound around and the summer hedges began to wetly scrape the windows. ‘Hector was very taken with her.’

‘She wrote to say something dreadfully important is happening and that I must come home at once,’ Bibs said. She shivered. ‘Hope she hasn’t got herself pregnant with that Beasley creature.’

‘It’s a big undertaking for a girl to run on her own. She’s very brave,’ I said as we drove in by gateless piers.

‘And looks after Father, another disaster. D’you mind going to the front door? It’s less carrying with this damn case.’

From the front, the old house appeared uninhabited. The lower windows were shuttered, the paint of the hall door hung in great, drooping tongues and ivy had run amok into the eaves and was threatening the chimneys. Bibs got out and put her suitcase by the boot-scrape.

‘Come in and have tea.’

‘I should get home.’

‘Just for ten minutes,’ said Bibs and led the way around the side.

We squeezed in past laurel bushes and brought down cupfuls of rainwater on ourselves.

‘I have such mixed feelings about this house, Bibs was saying. ‘When I’m away from it, I think about it the whole time, about each room, about the yard and the boxes. I go to sleep every night remembering every horse that ever stabled here, even those that were in livery. I smell them. It’s ridiculous.’

We had come into a yard at the back.

‘And then when I come home, as now, with months gone by since my last visit, as soon as I arrive the whole thing begins to take on another appearance. Does that sound daft? It’s as if I’ve been remembering another place entirely when I was away, for as soon as I get here I want to leave again.’

She halted and turned to me.

‘Do you think I’m completely mad?’

I heard her and yet her words held no meaning. Nor did I see her, for I was staring at the kitchen window of the farmhouse where her sister, Lucy, naked, was braced forward over the sink, with my husband, Ronnie, behind her.

For the first six months, each time I looked out of the bay window and saw a sky of racing clouds, my eyes, by reflex, sought the sea. The silence too I found eerie, especially at night. I had not realised how much part of me the ever-soughing sea had become, how the blunt crash of water on rock had become so essential. The sound of wind through trees was altogether different, sibilant, light breezes rinsing through the Dublin suburbs and leaving in their aftermath vales of stillness.

I had written and told Hector everything. He had not replied for nearly a month, a delay I found unbearable, and I waited every day for his letter as if for an imprimatur. I had letters from Rosa Santry keeping me up to date with the Monument gossip, but I found that the trivia essential to living in a community irrelevant and tiresome once one had left. I awoke one night, startled, and sat up drenched in sweat. I had had a dream, and although it was already fading, some vivid images remained: dead men in cloaks, blood in their nostrils, a copse surrounded by a waist-high wall of large, uneven stones that incorporated a fairy mound where oak trees grew at eccentric angles.

When Hector’s letter arrived at last — he had been on manoeuvres — it seemed almost flippant and assumed that the separation was temporary, for he asked whether if he came home for Christmas I would be back in Sibrille by then. I replied, explaining the now-legal nature of affairs, and how I had wanted nothing except my freedom. Although I did not say so to Hector, I realised that what freedom meant was that I would be living on my own from then on and be like the many women forced to refashion their lives from the unfriendly starting point of middle age. Ronnie, on the other hand, planned never to be alone. I learned from Bibs Toms that Lucy had put her father into the County Home, sold the farm and moved into the lighthouse. Ronnie had turned the corner.

I lived on remarkably little. With the help of my lovely Dick Coad, I made a flat in the garden basement and secured a tenant. My new circumstances, in which money was not a constant, unspoken problem, made me realise how insecure we had been in Sibrille and how that state of affairs, created and sustained by Ronnie, had contributed to my mute acquiescence. I joined the Royal Dublin Society where, thirty years before, my father, then a member, had brought me to the Spring Show. One or two people still spoke of him.

Hector’s letter in the summer was a sprawling half a dozen pages. It appeared he had come to Ireland and gone to Sibrille unannounced — to me a hurtful piece of information — and discovered Lucy. It had, by his own admission, been an ugly scene. Things broken, Lucy screaming and driving away, Ronnie putting Hector out at the point of a shotgun. Hector had walked to Monument where he had booked into the Commercial Hotel and, he wrote, for two days had gone on a bad bender. Ronnie had come into town, but Hector had refused to see him. Nor did he want to face coming to see me in Dublin, so ashamed was he of everything that had taken place. I read a new maturity in his letter. He said he never again wanted to meet Ronnie and asked me to come to England. My reaction was mixed. Absurd as it would be for me to be pleading Ronnie’s case, neither would I try to prosper in Hector’s affections by damning him. Not that I had anything but contempt for my husband; rather, I wanted to spare my son the debilitating environment of hate. So I spent several days over my reply, attempting to achieve a balance and hoping that in Hector’s new wisdom, I would find the consolation for which I ached. But before my letter could be posted, word came from Dick Coad in Monument to say that Langley Shaw was dead.

We drove south in late August sunshine in a car rented by Hector at Dublin Airport. I had brought a picnic basket and we stopped along the coast at a place where wooden benches overlooked the flat Irish Sea.

‘How are you coping?’ he asked.

We both had the same green eyes, but Hector’s had been newly wrought by a process of pain.

‘Better. No problems about money, for one thing. And life is always better when something nasty has been confronted.’

‘You look well.’

‘Thank you, Hector.’

‘Have you… is there…’

‘No, there is no one.’

‘I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know that if there was, I shouldn’t mind.’

‘That is very sweet of you.’

I took his hand and warmed my cheek with it. He had filled out into a man and his hair was cut short except for a quiff at the front that fell over his forehead. I looked at his big hands and wondered what kind of a woman he would find.

‘What about you? They must all be swooning over you.’

‘Nothing too serious, Mother, don’t worry.’

‘I won’t. I’m sure she’ll be lovely.’

‘She’ll be like you.’

‘Oh, Hector, that’s kind but you mustn’t waste your life looking for a younger me. It’s not worth it.’

‘I have to make that decision.’

As the peak of Dollan came into view, he asked, ‘Are you going to speak to him?’