‘Mrs Shaw.’

I had no idea how he knew me, discovered days later that he was from Sibrille.

‘Is my husband here?’

‘No, Ma’m, but the little fellow is fine,’ he said.

‘Oh, thank God!’

He was supporting my elbow as we proceeded down a corridor of blinding lights.

‘Gave us all a fright. Mrs Santry herself came in with him, there was a sight of blood, but it just goes to show, the more blood the better is often the way,’ the porter said.

I could not work it out. ‘Has my husband been in?’

‘No ma’m, although we sent a message to the post office in Sibrille,’ the porter said. ‘We didn’t want to send a telegram — think of the fright the poor man would get. Now, here we are.’

I went into the room and saw Hector in an enormous bed, his head bandaged, his thumb in his mouth, asleep.

‘Hector.’

I held him for my life. He opened his eyes and smiled.

‘He can see me!’ I cried.

‘There, now.’ A nurse wearing a silver badge was beside me.

‘He’s a little rascal, there’s no doubt. Aren’t you a rascal, Master Shaw?’

‘I was riding Kevin’s pony,’ Hector whispered and went back to sleep.

‘He’s bound to be exhausted, and so are you, Mrs Shaw,’ the nurse said. ‘We heard from Mrs Santry that you were in Dublin.’

‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘I never thanked Mr Jennings.’


No breath of wind disturbed the surface of the sea. It seemed bizarre that in the sixteen hours since I had left, so much had taken place, yet that Ronnie was still unaware. I was glad for him. When I told him, he would, despite how late it was, want to drive into Monument to see Hector, but none of the agony of my journey would attend his.

The headlamps of the hackney swept the still water as we came down the causeway. No life was evident in the windows of either the lighthouse or Langley’s. I felt emptied to a place of peace and exhaustion, as if I had walked twenty miles. So grateful, too, for all the many kindness I had been shown. To have been anxious about a house — a mere house, whatever its provenance — seemed profane in the face of what had nearly been. I promised myself to never again be concerned about possessions. We had something rare and wonderful, Ronnie, Hector and I.

The driver pulled up beside Ronnie’s car and brought my suitcase up the steps to the door. I stood and watched as he drove up into the village and then back into the mass of the land, his lights fading. Voices drifted down to me, people leaving the pub in Sibrille, their cheery ‘goodnights’, or the growl of a tractor, the transport for many. I often stood out here like this, alone, on the edge, the voices and sounds of the village a tenuous connection, yet a connection all the same to something essential that we were not quite part of.

I brought in my suitcase, closed the door. Coals glowed in the range. I heard movement upstairs. Ronnie must have been tired and had gone to bed early. I put the light on, filled the kettle to make tea for us, for I knew he would get a shock when he heard the news.

‘Ronnie!’ A voice in the kitchen could be heard clearly overhead. ‘It’s me, darling!’

Then I saw a page of notepaper lying on the table beside its torn envelope. I saw the stamp of Sibrille’s post office and that day’s date.

Dear Captain Shaw,

Your son has been in a riding accident. Please contact the hospital in Monument.

Sincerely, G. Mather (Postmaster)

I stood there, trying to work it out: how could Ronnie have read this note and not gone into Monument? His car was parked outside. How could he be in bed knowing Hector was in hospital? And then, as if volts were passing through my head, I heard another voice in our bedroom.

Shouting, I ran upstairs. As I came to our bedroom door, a low-sized, ghost-like figure clutching up a bed sheet went to pass me. I screamed. I tore the sheet away and stared at the defiant, pug-like face. I screamed and screamed as Ronnie pushed by me with armfuls of their clothes and went down the stairs. The smell of her in my bedroom. I could hear them going out the door. I flung open the windows and dragged over the bedding and, screaming, pitched everything into the sea. I could hear the car leaving. It was not just that I had caught him, but that he had elected to fornicate here rather than drive into Monument and be with Hector. Enraged, I hurled Ronnie’s shirts, shoes, ties, hunting clothes and boots into the Atlantic. I screamed. I threw out his brushes and silver dressing-table accoutrements, his entire drawers of socks and handkerchiefs and underwear. I threw every trace of him into the sea. Were it not for the splinter of reason that told me that my son needed me, I would have thrown myself.

CHAPTER SIX

1953 – 54

The sea ran all the way to the moon in endless corrugations. I slept, then sometime in the small hours, putting on a jacket and shoes, I went downstairs and out. Without a moon, the cliff would have been dangerous, but, on such nights, every hillock and blade of dew-shimmering grass was picked out with remorseless clarity. At the very apex of the rise, at the point where if one went any farther, sight of the lighthouse was lost, I put down. Over my left shoulder, if I turned, the light in the lantern bay glowed as if a secret were trapped in the deep.

Ronnie had moved out of the lighthouse and into the box-room in Langley’s. I refused to speak to him, so instead, he wrote to me, long, rambling letters full of remorse. Although he did not go so far as to blame the other woman for what had happened, knowing I would think even less of him for that, he did nonetheless insist that the evening had been impromptu.

I sat on the cliff and wondered about life’s apportionment. I would never really forgive Ronnie, I knew; but, then, life is a constant compromise with disappointment and imperfection.

The change from night to dawn came when the moon was still quite high and was attended by the whisper of a breeze from the east. Seabirds grumbled in the cliff below my feet and began to scatter outwards. Nothing dramatic occurred, no red ball of fire or the like; rather, more a gradual yellowing along the length of the eastern horizon and an ebbing of the black making way to blue, the sudden surge of the tide’s voice at dawn and the screech of oyster catchers.

Ronnie’s innate pomposity could not be concealed, even by his contrition: were I to give him another chance, I would discover how committed he was to our marriage and our love, he wrote. His letters travelled all the way from Sibrille into Monument and out again to the lighthouse.

I watched as black divers took shape and worked the surface of the sea. The wind stayed in the east, bringing with it an edge of coldness. I raised my face to catch the sun’s weak but precious heat. As the wind stiffened, white caps in their thousands appeared below me.


After three months, it was because of Hector that I allowed him back. He brought a camp bed with him and slept in the downstairs room. We had to discuss such things as where Hector was going to go to school and about the fact that I had decided not to sell my house in Dublin. As the months went by, we fell back into our routines.

He had become employed by a firm of Monument auctioneers, Gargan & Co., which was owned by a man whom I had formerly heard Ronnie describe as a corner boy. Now, Ronnie conducted auctions on his behalf. I could understand why Mr Gargan would want to employ someone like Ronnie: the Anglo-Irish voice and clear, unflinching stare over a room full of prospective buyers embodied integrity as far as the native Irish, long confused in these matters, would see it. Ronnie drew a salary — the first Shaw ever to do so — and Gargan & Co provided him with a motor car.


Ronnie’s neurosurgeon came to fish in May. Mr Hedley Raven had drilled holes in Ronnie’s head with the result that Ronnie could walk — a miracle, according to Dr Armstrong, our local G.P., who had read Hedley Raven’s account of Ronnie’s case in the British Medical Journal. I helped Delaney clean out a room in the coastguard house and put a bed into it and opened the windows and hung curtains. The Englishman arrived by taxi from Monument with three sets of rods in canvas holders and associated leather boxes and canvas bags.

‘My wife, Iz,’ Ronnie said.

The doctor removed his cap. When I saw his fair hair, I realised for the first time that Ronnie was now almost grey.

‘Iz?’

‘It’s short for Ismay.’

‘I like Iz,’ he said.

I said, ‘I hope you catch lots of fish.’

He and Ronnie went to the rocks, where they stayed until midnight, fishing the incoming tide. The next morning, I cooked one of their sea bass for breakfast.

‘You don’t fish?’ the doctor asked.

‘No. My mother-in-law tried to teach me, but I was hopeless,’ I said.

‘It’s all a matter of concentration,’ he said. His eyes were at the limit of blue where it becomes black. ‘You have to think like a fish. You have to surrender yourself to your instincts. Once you’ve learned to do it, then it’s simple.’

‘Where do you fish in England?’ Ronnie asked.

‘More in Scotland, on the Tay,’ Hedley Raven said. ‘But this sea stuff is like starting all over again.’

‘I spent some of the war near the Tay,’ Ronnie said.

‘How do you find the time?’ I asked. ‘Between operating and writing articles?’

‘Aha, someone’s been talking!’ the doctor said.