Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

I made my way with Hector in by the never-locked backdoor of our lighthouse and climbed the curving stone steps. The child looked up at me and smiled in such a recognizable way that, for a moment, I was swept away on a flash flood of memory. Later, in the middle floor with its cheery fireplace, I sat with Hector on my knee and beheld the panorama laid out below. In Sibrille, we saw the sun down all the way to the sea horizon, and everyday the point at which it plunged moved so that I could measure off its progress on the windows of the lantern bay. The sea lay flat when the wind was off the land, as it was that day, allowing a glazed path of red to run all the way from the sun to the lighthouse. I felt tired much of the time, which was not at all unusual, I had been told, in the year that followed one’s first baby. I slept a lot and often when Ronnie was late, he spent the night downstairs on the big sofa so as not to wake me.

As we watched the sunset, I heard a car drive down the causeway. It was a long, sleek maroon car with enormous brass headlamps, I saw as I looked out. It pulled in before the house and Ronnie got out and straightened his hair with his hands and put his cap on. Because of the sun’s reflection on the car’s windscreen, I could not see the driver. Ronnie stooped forward, saying goodbye. I saw a woman’s hand reach out, a thick, gold band at its wrist. Ronnie held the tips of the fingers briefly, then as the hand disappeared, he straightened up and turned around and looked directly up at me.

We lived, in the main, independently of his parents, and, each evening, I prepared a meal and set a table in the lantern bay and we both sat down after gin and had dinner together.

‘How is my family?’ he asked, throwing his cap on a chair. He leaned to kiss me, then Hector.

‘We’re well, thank you.’

I watched as he poured us drinks, his steady hand, the long, reassuring curve of his back in its tweed jacket. There was no tonic to be had then, so we took our gin with water and a tiny drop from an old jar of bitters.

‘Cheers.’ He clinked his glass to mine and looked at me warmly across the rim of it as he drank. ‘You look lovely.’

‘What did you do today?’ I enquired.

‘The usual. Pottered here and there. Chased up a few contacts that may shortly have land for sale. Looked at a young horse in Eillne.’

‘I see.’

‘Reggie Blood’s. Good strong gelding, just broken. Popped a pole on him.’

‘And?’

‘Asked Reggie to have him dropped over.’

We sat, a pitcher of cold water between us. As he ate, Ronnie mewed with pleasure.

‘You know, when I told someone, can’t remember who, that you cook this, they didn’t believe me. They said, “Monkfish? You must be mad!”’

‘Mr Wise told me about it.’

‘I’ve seen the locals throw away barrels of them on the slip. Think they’re so ugly they shouldn’t be eaten,’ Ronnie said and grinned.

‘Goes to show that you should never judge by appearances.’

He looked up at me sharply, then resumed his meal.

‘Where’s your car?’ I asked.

‘Hmm?’

‘Your car.’

‘Oh, in Monument.’

We brought down the things to the kitchen. I put the kettle on the range and husbanded a quarter spoon of precious tea into the pot.

‘Why?’

‘Beg your pardon?’

‘Why did you leave your car in Monument?’

‘Oh, I see. Got a lift out, thought it might help the ration book.’

‘From whom?’

‘A client, or should I say, fingers crossed.’

‘Her car was big enough.’

‘Was it?’

‘Enormous, I would have said.’

‘American, so I expect it was.’

We heaped the plates and dishes in a pile beside the sink. Ronnie looked at his watch. ‘Fancy a turn out the rock?’

‘Who is she?’

‘Oh, just someone who wants to hunt and all that. The usual. Looking for a place.’

‘And have you got one for her?’

‘Showed her a few, yes.’

‘Married?’

‘Never asked, although she’s called Mrs, so I expect she must be. Now. How about it?’ he asked, putting his cap on.

‘I don’t think so, thank you.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

Ronnie’s eyes bulged. ‘Iz..?’ His mouth had dropped open. ‘Are you… you’re not… you don’t think…’

I turned away.

‘Oh, God,’ Ronnie said. ‘I mean, she’s just a client. She’s nothing. You don’t think..?’

My tiredness suddenly gained the upper hand. ‘Of course, I don’t,’ I said and sat down.

Ronnie lurched to his knees beside me and caught my hands. ‘You are so beautiful, I would die,’ he said.

I felt my tears rise.

‘Each time I see another woman I think how lucky I am to have you,’ he said. ‘If I thought that anyone might come between us, I’d sooner jump into the sea.’

I loved Sibrille. We had not four seasons, but one for every day. Save for those days on which we would have been blown away like matchwood, I brought Hector out along the cliffs. It never grew cold in Sibrille. Damp, yes — water ran down the walls inside, and seven months of the year, fires were lighting day and night to try and keep bedding dry — but the piercing cold I had been used to, the breath-catching frosts of the midlands, were absent here. Neither did the grasses die back as they had in Meath, but accumulated on the cliffs in fat, spongy wads that Hector and I bounced on. When the tide was rising and the moon was full, whatever the time of year, we wrapped up and went out on the cliffs to watch the molten silver pour in along the causeway.

Our lives, at least Hector’s and mine, seldom touched those of other people. At Christmas, we went to the Bloods in Eillne for drinks, where I met the local curate, Father O’Dea, a small, dark man who wore a long soutane and a cape with an embroidered hem. It was he who encouraged me to seek out other parts of the county, places like Leire, a coastal spot south of Monument with cliffs even more imposing than those of Sibrille, where one found a beach beneath a convent and dunes that on a warm day were a blessed place for a picnic.

The seasons seemed scarcely over till they came round again. November sea drove mightily over the causeway. After breakfast one Saturday, I heard activity in the yard as Hector and I went by. Peppy was on the mounting block, trying to sit a young horse.

‘Let Roarty up first,’ I heard Langley say.

‘Roarty’s not going hunting’, Peppy said.

She was fifty-five, but from the back, in her close fitting hacking jacket, she might well have been my age.

‘Watch out!’ called Langley as the horse, despite Roarty at his head, skittered away from the block; but Peppy had sat him, side-saddle, the double reins in her quiet hands.

‘Don’t like his eye,’ Langley muttered.

Hector was put to bed every day after his lunch, and for a few hours, if I didn’t go and lie down myself, or sit reading, I would explore the inlets and marshes around Sibrille that were too far for the child to walk to. One afternoon in late September, I put on boots and an old jacket of Ronnie’s and headed for the small bogs that lay on the other side of the village, where, between September and Halloween, Peppy wildfowled with a 20-bore. From these marshy places, she brought home food for two families: mallard and teal, widgeon and goose, pintail and pochard.

Ronnie was away for most of every day and often the evenings too; Langley was not someone with whom anyone could have more than a superficial relationship, I decided; and Stonely and Delaney spent much of every day playing whist in the kitchen. I had come to realise that Peppy was the core of the Shaw family and it was to her unwavering steadiness that I moored myself. She was a clever woman, far cleverer than any of the people she lived with. In Monument, she was regarded with respect, for she saw that the bills were paid mostly on time and treated everyone, no matter what their station, exactly the same. In this, I think, she had the great advantage of being English, for the English have little left to prove when it comes to Ireland, whereas the Anglo-Irish must ever strive to make the case in which they will always fail.

I had not seen Peppy shoot before, but since we had eaten our fill of her mallard on three of the five previous evenings, I thought that I would go in search of her that afternoon and get my fresh air along the string of bogs that hugged the valley. A fine, salty mist blew in off a churning sea. It was a Monday, a day on which the village was deserted since all the farmers in the area attended the Monday cattle fair in Monument. At the foot of the hill beyond the village, I crossed a stile and walked along a crooked path into the heart of the valley.

The acres to my left were hilly, to my right rushy and wet. Beyond the rushes — in reality, a river that had silted up — was poor, knobby snipe grass on which a cow and her calf stood in apparent contentment. The land gathered in a point about ten yards ahead of me. As I prepared to round it, two shots rang out, so loud they might have been inside my head. I began to shake. Two farther shots exploded, deafeningly.

Of course, only moments were involved in which the first brace of wild duck had crossed Peppy’s head on the far side of the point, and she had dropped one. Then a farther pair had risen from the reeds with the gunfire and she had killed one of those too and had then reloaded and taken the missed duck of the first pair, which had forlornly come back in search of its mate. I knew nothing of this until I felt her strong arms around me.