Authors: Peter Cunningham

The Sea and the Silence

THE SEA AND THE SILENCE

A NOVEL

PETER CUNNINGHAM

Published in June 2013 by Orchard Wall Publishing

Cover Design: Aine Cassidy

Kindle Edition

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IN GIRUM IMUS NOCTE ET CONSUMIMUR IGNI

We go in circles by night and are consumed by fires

-Anonymous

Carol

PROLOGUE

By ten in the morning, the fug from the river at low tide had already crept into the upstairs office in Mead Street. It is ever so in mid-August, thought Dick Coad, as he closed the window. At almost any other time of year, he could discharge his daily quota of probate, insurance claims and conveyancing of property to a background of ships loading or discharging and the clanging of wharf cranes, but in August, when the tide was low, the River Lyle’s gum-like, perspiring mud-banks released a mephitis which oozed across Long Quay into the streets and up into the centre of the town.

On the desk before him lay an opened envelope and a will.

Dick reread the will, and for the second time that morning was overwhelmed by loss. Unmarried, childless, he nonetheless had much professional experience of both marriages and children, having presided over the sundering and distribution of each to a point where, had he been less wise, he might have felt that he understood them. She had been a caution to any such presumption. Although he had known her over many years, he had never been able to grasp why she had taken certain decisions. Beauty like hers, he would have once thought, made women free.

Neither had her appearance changed until near the end, and then it had been hard to watch. He had wept that day on the train home from Dublin, four months ago, for he had known it was over. Not that a solicitor could shed tears for every client about to die — many rejoiced — but she had been different. Dick would always see her as he had that first day on the platform in Monument Station: he was expecting a Mrs Shaw from Sibrille, and this beautiful young woman appeared.

Dick cracked a match alight for a cigarette and through a tail of smoke observed the distant river beyond the chimney pots. Her instructions were curious: for herself, cremation. Dick was to scatter her ashes on the sea at the point beyond the lighthouse where the tablet was set. He knew the spot well and was part of the committee responsible for the memorial’s upkeep. Curious, but appropriate.

All her real property, including the house in Dublin, was bequeathed to Miss Bibs Toms, instructions that had caused Dick to smile four months ago, and now he smiled again.

Finally, he was to read the contents of the two taped-up parcels. Dick lifted them on to his desk. The first, in black letters done in a felt pen, said, ‘1: Hector’; the second, ‘2: Iz’. Miss Toms had told him on the telephone that the second parcel had been finished only six weeks ago.

Dick sliced open the wrapping paper with a paper knife. His instructions were clear. He was to read the contents of these parcels. Then, he was to destroy them.

HECTOR

CHAPTER ONE

1945

I had heard so much about it that, like all things eagerly awaited, I was prepared for disappointment.

‘Are you ready?’ Ronnie Shaw asked, and I smiled.

‘This better be good,’ I said.

We breasted a hill, pulled up and got out. The truth is, I gasped. So much sea and, by comparison, so little land. As I stared, by one of those miracles of light, the sea shone as if all the silver of the world was buried just beneath its surface.

‘Well?’ Ronnie asked.

‘It’s beautiful.’

‘I knew it!’ he cried. ‘I knew you’d say that!’

He caught me up by the waist and lifted me in the air.

‘Ronnie!’

‘I see the sea!’ he shouted, whirling us round and around.

We were both shrieking.

‘Ronnie, you’ll drop me!’

‘I see the sea!’ he cried as I clung to him and laughed for the pure joy of it. ‘I see the sea!’

Today it would seem odd — it would seem inexplicable — for a woman of twenty-three not to have seen in advance the house and place in which she was destined to live, but in Ireland then, petrol was severely rationed, trains ran irregularly and long trips were undertaken only in emergencies.

Ronnie’s car, an MG Midget of the late 1930s, had squeaked and jarred throughout the six hours of our journey south, and as we came in along the quays of Monument, every surface gleamed and shone from recent rain, and rain squalls had buffed and energized the chessboard-like dairy country beyond Monument too so that it glistened through the full register of summer colours. As we turned off just short of the village and drove out along the causeway, the rain began again and the car’s single wiper whipped back and forth with fierce determination.

The Shaws’ sprawling home stood behind the old lighthouse in a garden of rioting hydrangeas. A wind-blasted croquet lawn with correct white hoops stood disdainfully on a small promontory. As we got out, a sudden screeching erupted above our heads as sea-gulls wheeled, light glinting on their bellies. Ronnie brought my hand to his cheek.

‘Our lighthouse,’ he said with such pride that my affection for him rose even farther. ‘Is there something funny?’

‘It’s the most wonderful lighthouse in the world!’ I laughed as we walked arm in arm out the causeway.

To our right, above high, yellow cliffs, cattle grazed. The rain rolled down in wet veils on to the gently toiling water so that between rain and sea there was no distinction. This was the sea I would relate to most during my early days in Sibrille, the way I first found it, for although it could rise into furies in which the lighthouse itself would be engulfed, or only the next morning lie still as a mirror, it spoke to me most during summer’s days of warm, misty rain.

‘Here’s something I told you about but you didn’t believe me either,’ Ronnie said and his eyes popped.

‘Could I ever have doubted you in anything?’ I asked.

‘Probably not,’ he said, his moustache twitching.

We had come to the end of the natural groyne where a rectangular tablet had been set, facing out. Four columns of names, more than a hundred in all, were recorded. They had been blown off course on their way home having fought the French, and had met their watery end here, off this jagged point. Under their names, the inscription:

Their Lives Were Cut Short

By The Awful Dispensation Of An All-Wise

And Inscrutable Providence

We had married in the Catholic Church in Sutton, outside Dublin, with my mother, Violet, and Ronnie’s parents, Langley and Peppy Shaw, in attendance. Then Ronnie and I had driven north, across the border into County Down, and had spent our four-day honeymoon in an enormous hotel between the mountains and the sea.

The Shaws were in all but one respect a typical Anglo-Irish family, which, in 1945, meant people of some means and land for whom achievement meant nothing unless it related to a horse. But they were Catholics. Although religion ran quiet in Ronnie, it ran true. His father, Langley, had arrived at his majority with his inheritance in tatters: unsupervised land agents had diddled the books for twenty years. Lofty and lanky, eighteenth century of manner in his courtly, unconcerned way, with his perpetual smile and his refusal ever to be ruffled, Langley had been educated in England by Benedictines and had come home, and although his bankers had murmured their reservations, in 1890 had built an oratory in Gortbeg, their then-large estate, at a cost of £2,500.

By my time, almost fifty years later, the old days were spoken of as a golden age, relived in well-practised anecdotes. A staff of eleven had been maintained inside and out, notorious among whom was the butler, Johnson, blighted by polio down one side, who had applied butter to the afternoon tea bread with his tongue.

Religion, on the face of it, was of little consequence in 1922 when a local militia came to burn Gortbeg. However, an advance warning had been sent allowing Langley to ship out furniture, paintings and chinaware, so although the burning honoured ancient rituals, the saboteurs were less than committed and only the east wing, which included a breakfast room with wallpaper by Pugin, was razed. Bureaucracy triumphed where fire had failed. More than a decade later, Gortbeg and all its lands were acquired by the new government and paid for in non-negotiable bonds. Langley went to London, disposed of a diamond the size of a wren’s egg, put £2,000 into War Loan and bought the lighthouse, the coastguard station and fifty acres in Sibrille.

Ronnie amused me, and always had, from the first day I met him. What had once come across as pompousness, even arrogance, was in fact an utter belief in himself that was endearing and frequently comical. He had gone to Belfast in 1943 to join an armoured regiment and had taken part the following year in shoring-up operations in France, where he was lucky not to have been killed by a German sniper. Shipped back to hospital in England, he had spent the remainder of the war completing a correspondence course in estate agency, which enabled him when he came home to put letters after his name: Captain Ronald Shaw, M.B.V.I.

‘Ever tell you why I decided to join up?’

We lay on the soft summer grasses of the cliff in late July. Ronnie’s elbows jutted for the sky, their leather patches glistening. Between us and the horizon I could see men in mackerel boats, working their lines.

‘Was it because your father wanted you to?’

‘Absolutely not, the only thing my father approves of killing is foxes.’

Ronnie had a gap between his two front teeth, which, along with his big eyes, made even his attempts at being serious amusing. He said,

‘I was sitting out here, in this exact spot, one evening in 1941, and I could actually see German bombers blowing up cargo ships.’

‘From here?’

‘I could see the explosions.’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘She doesn’t believe me.’ Ronnie looked up at seagulls. ‘Would someone please explain to this beautiful woman that I am incapable of deception?’

‘Very well, I believe you.’

‘Thank you. Well, as I say, here I was and out there I could see this appalling behaviour. On our sea. I decided I just had to stop it.’

I laughed. ‘And so you did!’

Ronnie sat up and looked out to the horizon. All of a sudden he looked like someone marooned in time from another era. I said, ‘It must have been hard.’

He put his arm around my shoulders. ‘I was lucky,’ he said quietly. ‘Many weren’t.’

‘I know.’

‘We shall always pray from them.’

We had both been brought up the Anglo Irish way, where emotion was ever seen as weakness. Ronnie leant out, plucked a sea-pink by its stem, held it up for a moment, then tossed it over the cliff.

‘To absent friends,’ he said.

Without warning, I felt my breaths coming short.

‘Ronnie…’

‘My God, I’m sorry, I’ve upset you.’

‘No, it’s not that.’

‘It’s not?’

I turned my face away and closed my eyes.

Ronnie said, ‘Are you unwell, darling?’

‘Sort of,’ I said, turning back to him. His round eyes and startled face made me sniffle and giggle at the same time.

‘Oh God, what?’ he said.

‘Ronnie,’ I said, ‘I think I may be pregnant.’

Langley and Peppy lived in the coastguard house, together with a woman called Delaney, Ronnie’s nurse who now cooked, and, for most of the year, Peppy’s younger brother, Stonely. One’s first impression upon entering the coastguard house was that a burglary had taken place. Doors and the drawers of cupboards and chests stood open or pulled out in every room, and from the innards spewed their incoherent contents. On the floors stood mounds of books, sacks of potatoes, the wheels of bicycles, rubber boots, riding crops, stacks of pictures, golf clubs, boxes of cartridges, fishing rods, waders, suitcases, jam-jars, cases of gin, propagating vegetables, milk churns, bedding, the mounted masks of famous vixens, oil drums, boxes containing the Gortbeg chandeliers, camp beds, step-ladders and a rocking horse. Such disorder went unnoticed by the inhabitants, who picked their way carefully through the chaos until they found what they sought — a book, or a cup for tea, or a chair without a cat in it.

When I first met Langley, he was stooped and arthritic, spindly legged and alarmingly thin, but the one time I saw him hefted up on a difficult mare of Peppy’s, I grasped in an instant how he fitted his horse, the lightness of his hands and how all the soreness went out of him. He had hunted for more than fifty years with wily, ragged-tongued hounds, spreading them over the tricky gripes around Gortbeg like a tan cloak. Man and beast, earth and sky, human blood and river water became all the one to him. He had lived it not once, but countless times; once a week, Langley fell to his knees in the church in Sibrille and thanked God for His munificence.

In the vast, upstairs room of a nursing home not far from Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel, my baby was born. The doctor stayed with me all night, and three nurses. With all my heart I believed that I was going to die. As they kept passing the cold flannel over my brow, I could feel the shape of my veins standing out there. Then, just when I had screamed my utmost, and begged for death — for me and for my child and for the whole world — I could feel an easing in the bones of my pelvis, which must have dislocated. On my thighs, I felt the blood rush out on to the rubber sheets and then the most unforgettable feeling, the passing from me of such a warm and solid proof of my own happiness as it moved, still partly in me, and I reached out my wet hands, crying although I didn’t care who knew, pumping blood and milk, and I said, ‘My love.’

Ronnie had been up two days before, lunching at his club, bemused by the fussing nurses. Telegrams were sent to Sibrille relaying the news, but I didn’t expect to see anyone until the end of the week and so was surprised when next day the door opened and Peppy walked in.

‘You poor child,’ she said and kissed me, her nose cold as mutton. Many years before, her father had bought her a house in Dublin and she sometimes came up to inspect it. Now she went to the cot in the corner of the room. ‘Oh my God, he’s big enough,’ she said, sniffing. ‘Just as well he didn’t go full term.’

Peppy’s winters were given to fox hunting and shooting, her springs and summers to sea and river fishing.

‘Is he taking his bottle well?’ she asked.

‘I’m feeding him,’ I said.

Peppy frowned and sat in a wing-backed chair which the nurse had brought over. ‘I never did.’

‘Could you not?’

‘Oh, I expect I could have, I can’t remember, but they thought it better not to.’

‘The same here, but I insisted.’

‘If one must, then not beyond a few days.’ Peppy shivered, then smiled radiantly. ‘You look so beautiful!’

‘How is Ronnie?’

‘Delirious. He’ll be up tomorrow, or Thursday. He’s cub hunting.’

I laughed.

‘I told him to be careful, not to break his neck before he’d had a chance to see his son and heir,’ Peppy said. She glanced to the corner. ‘No causes for concern?’

‘They say he’s perfection.’

Peppy removed her hat and lit a cigarette. She bent forward and unlaced her leather knee boots and shook them off, then blowing smoke from the side of her mouth, sat back and crossed her legs. She said,

‘I remember when Ronnie was born. I had him in Gortbeg, the most dreadful experience. Langley was in and out, but the person I missed most was my mother.’

‘You must have been lonely.’

Peppy shivered and looked towards the windows. ‘Unimaginably.’

A nurse came in, picked up the infant and brought him over to me.

‘A little man like this’d be much better off with a big, big bottle,’ she said.

I said, ‘He’s got two big, big bottles here, thank you, nurse.’

Peppy watched the baby searching for my breast. She said,

‘He’s a Shaw, for sure.’

I smiled but Peppy was pensive. ‘I wanted to get out of England, you see, whatever that took. Three of my brothers had already been killed in the Great War and Stonely was handicapped. Our home was like a nursery for death.’

‘Then you met Langley.’

‘I came over here to hunt, he followed me back. My father was too distracted to take much notice of him. We were married in a church outside Carlisle, following which Langley, drunk, rode in a point to point and had such a heavy fall that he subsequently never remembered anything about that day, including the wedding ceremony.’

Tea was brought in and the nurse took the child from me and winded him. Peppy dropped a lump of sugar into her cup.

‘After six months here, I made a rule that I would never ask, and I never did. Never “Where were you last night?” or “What were you doing?” Never. I took up fly fishing.’

I felt for her, this bony, plain woman who had so much to give.

‘Was it bad?’ I asked softly.

Peppy slurped tea, put the cup to one side. ‘I can’t remember, to be honest.’

‘Were you never in love?’

‘Love is something I’ve never quite grasped, although I daresay you have,’ she said.

I closed my eyes and allowed myself to drift away.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I have.’