The Sea and the Silence (16 page)

It was lunchtime the next day when I heard the car on the avenue. I hurried out and Tom was standing there, his big, freckled face anxious. I was so afraid that the guards, or Bella, or the IRA might arrive and find him that I made him put the car in a shed, then brought him down to the lake field where no one could see us.

‘What’s going on, Iz?’

‘I think something dreadful has happened,’ I said and told him about Bella and Nick.

‘Jesus,’ Tom said and rubbed his face. ‘That’s just what he needs.’

Across the lake, the stands of beech had begun the first phase of their turning. On the near shore, a heron only needed to spread its wings to become airborne.

‘Is he all right?’ I asked.

‘He’s agitated’, Tom said.

‘We’re going to England.’

‘I know. He’s working double time trying to get as much money together as he can.’

‘Could he not just go to the guards and tell them the truth?’

‘He could,’ Tom said, ‘but he could end up swinging for it. A guard has been shot. Frank covered up for Stephen and that makes him an accessory to murder.’

‘Why did he do it?’ I asked. ‘Why did he put his life in danger?’

‘He grew up beside Stephen,’ Tom said. ‘They’re like brothers. And in more ways than one. You see, Stephen is almost family there.’

It took me a moment to work it out, but then I suddenly remembered the fierceness of Alice as she had tried to go to Stephen’s rescue at the dance.

‘Alice,’ I said.

Tom nodded. ‘Alice and Stephen,’ he said. ‘How could Frank have not covered for him?’

So much I didn’t know, and yet I clung to the image of us sailing away, leaving all this behind. A covey of doves flew over our heads, banking sharply.

‘Please go back to Monument and tell him what I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘And tell him that I’ll be in Kingsbridge at the agreed time, but not next week. Tomorrow.’

The Misses Carr owned a fishing lodge on a lake in County Cavan and had invited Mother there. She left that evening in John Rafter’s van, her hat askew, her painting equipment stowed in a picnic hamper. I could do nothing about the shock she would get when she returned and found me gone. But, I reasoned, she and I would soon be separated anyway. As for Longstead, the staff would look after it until Allan came home, but, in the meantime, it would be managed by Bella or Harry. In fact, Bella’s fiancée’s political connections would be put to better use in persuading the Land Commission to leave us alone than in persecuting the man I loved.

It was Bella I wrote to in the end, explaining what I was doing and why. I gave her no clue as to where we were going and, the next morning I left the letter on the hall table, then with a small suitcase, drove as far as Grange, where I caught the bus.

In their inexorable changing, the deep, autumn colours of the countryside matched how I felt. All my childhood, I had been used to going away, and although this was more final, Ireland too would eventually change for the better, I knew, and one day we could come back.

The bus left me by Nelson’s Pillar and I began the walk towards the quays which led to Kingsbridge. We had agreed five o’clock and it was now just after three. I knew from my school trips that the boats left around seven. Wind blew in from the sea and made tiny waves on the surface of the Liffey. I could imagine him in his railway carriage, now steaming through County Kildare, checking his watch and watching for the first sight of Dublin.

A train stood at a platform in Kingsbridge, sending out massive explosions of steam that gathered like rain clouds in the span of the vaulted roof. Passengers hurried to board and whistles sounded. I found the platform where the train from Monument was expected and stood there, near the buffers, my eyes on the curve of the track, half a mile away.

I thought about Bella and her ability for destruction and wondered, when all was said and done, if she would ever know the happiness that I had found. It was not that I wished her any less, and not so long before I would have worried for her, but I could not understand how two sisters as we were could in such a fundamental way be so different.

I saw the steam first. It obscured the bend on which my eyes were locked, but then the chimney of the train appeared and it whistled gladly, like a horse that knows it is home. It came in surrounded by its own noise and its steam and shuddered to a halt ten yards from where I stood. Steam wafted over the platform and the disembarking passengers loomed out of it like ghosts. I could always make him out from a distance and now strained to see him before he saw me. The passengers were handing their tickets to a collector and filing out past me. I looked in every face, then beyond them. I saw a tall figure hand a ticket to the collector. I suddenly felt my legs go funny. She walked towards me.

‘Do you remember me?’ Alice said.

A coal fire burned in the station bar. I had told her I didn’t want a drink, but she went anyway and ordered two glasses of brandy. I was weak with terror.

‘Where’s Frank?’ I asked when she sat down again.

‘Drink the brandy.’

‘Where is he? Has he been arrested?
Where is he
?’

‘Frank is gone, Iz,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘You mean, gone ahead.’

‘I mean, gone. He’s gone. He’s not coming back,’ she said.

‘But that’s impossible,’ I said. ‘He and I are going away together.’

She looked at me coldly and I then remembered the night of the dance, when we had been introduced and how she had looked at me in the same way. She said,

‘It wouldn’t have worked. Believe me, it never does.’

I stared at her. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘Too big a difference,’ she said,’ the two sides don’t mix.’

‘What do you know about us?’ I cried. ‘You know nothing. I want to know where Frank has gone!’

She looked away, as if I lacked sense, then she took a drink. ‘I’m sorry, but how could he ever trust you after what has happened? Your sister tried to turn the law on him.’

‘You think I had something to do with that? It was I who warned him about it! Why are you saying this?’ I cried.

‘You’ve no notion, do you?’ she said. ‘You think that people like you, with your land and your fine ways, can just stoop down and pick one of us up when it suits you?’

‘You have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said. I was shaking with fear.

Her face seemed to soften. ‘He did what he did as much out of concern for you as for his own safety. It was a hard decision, but Frank made it. He didn’t want both of your lives to be ruined.’

‘I don’t believe he said that,’ I said.

‘He did give me a message for you.’

I wanted to stand up and run away from her, but I couldn’t. ‘What?’

‘He said to tell you to live your dream.’

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

1944 – 45

Winter entombed the midlands. Mother was so cold that her bed and wardrobe were moved downstairs to the little sitting room where a fire was kept going around the clock. Except for those in the kitchen, every window was permanently iced up and no water came from taps or flowed in the toilet. The electricity failed for days at a time and we reverted to the Longstead of my childhood, of trimming the wicks of oil lamps and of candles. The wireless no longer worked. Outside, wind whipped snow into massive drifts which threatened to further engulf the house. I kept warm most days by shovelling. Even if we’d had fuel for the car, we could not have gone anywhere, as whole sections of Meath and Kildare were cut off. John Rafter came up the avenue with provisions and the post; he sat in the kitchen and I made him tea. The whole country was prey to widespread hardship and trouble, he told me.

‘What kind of trouble?’ I asked.

‘You know, Iz,’ he said. ‘There’s some lads out there that’ll never stop until they get a bullet.’

In the early days, I did not think that I could live. As Frank had introduced me to the meaning of love, so had I come to learn grief from him as well. I understood then what Mother was going through, for we had both lost someone we loved. Grief clung to me, and if moments of brief respite occurred, when the crushing reality resumed, it was always worse.

I could not understand what had happened. Our plans had been so clear, the dangers we were escaping so manifest. I could only imagine that, in the end, Bella’s intervention had been decisive for him, that the sheer scale of what we would have to overcome seemed too much. And yet, up to then, I would have bet everything that no scale was too much for him, he who always emerged from the fiercest mệlée with the ball in his hands.

But as the days towards Christmas wore on and I heard nothing from him, in order to preserve my own sanity and my dignity, I had to accept the possibility that I had made a mistake. I had been prepared to risk everything, but he had not. What lack this arose from in him, I couldn’t say, except that it must have come ultimately from a deficit of courage in the one area in which I would have sworn that he was peerless. And then I thought of his sister, and the crooked brace of prejudice in which her thoughts were formed, and I accepted with dismay that in the end, history had won out. It was cruel, for it called into question the value of every moment we had enjoyed.

I set about forgetting him. My letter to Bella, which had never been sent but which for some reason I had kept, now seemed like part of someone else’s story. It was easier if I persuaded myself that, in truth, I had been lucky to escape. This did not liberate my soul, just deadened it.

We had been invited to Mount Penrose for Christmas, but Mother was relieved when I suggested we stay at home. Still, Norman Penrose was one of the very few who made the journey up our avenue — on the pretext of checking the farm. He came in and stood in front of the fire and drank tea laced with whisky. I made sure that Mother stayed put on these occasions, for I would not have been able for Norman on his own. And yet, there was an inexorability about him that led me, despite myself, to go to bed some nights thinking the unthinkable.

I considered running away, but there was still a war on and one could go nowhere. We had no money coming in and the bank had begun writing us stiff letters. The staff at Longstead, or what few remained, knew the dire situation, but at least in Longstead they had a roof over their heads and the produce, however disorganised, of a 1,500-acre farm. Although the war was as good as won, it still hung over us even on a good day, we who lived in a country that was meant to be at peace.

A week after Christmas, John Rafter delivered a box of provisions which I brought to the kitchen and unpacked. The box was lined with newspaper. Something caught my eye. I removed the paper from the box and smoothed it out. I had to sit down to steady myself. A man and a woman stared out from their photographs beneath black headlines. The paper was three weeks old. The couple had been shot dead in an ambush in Tipperary by armed members of the detective bureau. Both had been members of the IRA. His name was Stephen Duggan. Hers was Alice Waters.

As if a trowel had been taken to where my recent grief had been heeled in, now it was laid bare again without remorse. It was not just that death seemed so near, or so shocking, but that life itself suddenly seemed so trivial. Overwhelming, too, was the feeling that I was so utterly marginal to important events. I, who thought she had been at the centre of developments, learned of them only weeks in arrears from discarded newspapers.

I wondered if Frank’s picture had appeared in some newspaper or other, and if he too was dead or just locked in a jail. He might well have been, for all we knew in Longstead. I grieved then, not just for him again, but for his sister and for Stephen Duggan, a man I had seen just once. I had been foolish to think that the wedge driven by centuries between our different classes could be removed by something as insubstantial as love.

I thought much of love during those days and came to see it as just an ideal that men strove for, like truth or liberty, unattainable in any absolute sense. One man’s truth was another’s lie and what was freedom to one was slavery to the next. Life was about survival, about using what you had to best advantage and in not throwing away everything in a moment of madness.

I came in at noon one day in mid-January and saw the pile of unopened post lying on the table in the breakfast room. I had begun collecting the bills and other pieces of business correspondence, since if they went through Mother’s hands they invariably disappeared, and letters concerning Daddy’s estate which a solicitor in Navan was dealing with. I sat down and began to slit open all the envelopes. When I lifted the last one, I saw the telegram. It lay there in its green buff with the utmost sinisterness. I realised a number of things at once: that Mother must have taken separate delivery of the telegram and decided not to open it; that she must then have hidden it beneath the pile of letters, knowing that I would discover it. I realised then too that the entire house was hushed. Listening. Waiting for me to come in here and do what Mother had been unable to do. What else do I remember? I’ll tell you what — the silence of death that lay everywhere, at whose centre I stood.

We had no one to bury, for Allan was never found. The beautiful, clear-eyed boy who loved his horses and his fishing and who would come home and put everything to rights had been obliterated by a mine. I remember little of the next days, just that my body seemed like a well ever primed by grief. I wept without cease.

At the memorial service, I heard but every other word from our rector, a tired-looking man who spoke of love and suffering and compassion. I wanted him to say how justice lacked in even the most fundamental sense, about the basic unfairness in nature and, if he existed at all, which I doubted, of God’s unremitting cruelty. God seemed to have us singled out for the most heartless of his games. But our game was now as good as over. I knew what had to be done.

Bella, married and pregnant, arrived home with Nick. Harry came from London and Lolo drove down from Fermanagh with her husband. Our allies gathered from every corner of Ireland, some of whom I had never before seen and, in all likelihood, never would again, but they had been galvanised into action despite fuel rationing, floods and great distance, as if our shoring up was a sudden but vital campaign in the survival of our kind. They were of all ages and frequently bizarre in appearance, centuries mattering little for changes in dress or deportment, and almost all of them were determined to display that shining, outward resilience and imperviousness to grief which is the traditional hallmark of the colonist. From Monument came the Shaws, Ronnie’s parents, a lopsided, always half-smiling man and a big, angular woman who introduced herself as Peppy.

‘Ronnie knows, dear. He’s devastated,’ she said and kissed my cheek, although it was the freezing cold tip of her big nose that I felt most. ‘He wants you to know you’re in his thoughts constantly.’

‘I’m glad he’s well,’ I said.

‘Ronnie is like his father, he’ll enjoy himself wherever he goes, even during a war,’ she said. ‘Do you know that when his regiment shipped out for France, he brought two sets of hunting boots, trees intact?’

I smiled.

‘Ronnie was right,’ Peppy said. ‘You’re divine.’

‘How is… Monument?’ I asked, unable to stop myself.

Peppy Shaw’s pale eyes were flecked at their centres with shards of knowing grey.

‘Some people don’t seem to understand that their particular war has long been won,’ she said quietly. ‘There’s no need of guns and bullets. They who once ruled are finished, by which I mean “we”. This is the country of young Ireland now and time is all that is needed for it to come of age.’

Our tragedy had cut through local politics too, it seemed, for men from all parties assembled at our church, and even though it was forbidden by their own religion, many of them came inside. Later, the house was thronged and warm and people shouted to be heard. Mother sat, mute, as though winded by a fall, the Misses Carr, disconcerting replicas, either side of her.

‘Iz, we must talk.’

One would have liked to say how pregnancy suited Bella, how she had bloomed; alas, her bump looked more like an impediment which she was powerless to navigate. We went upstairs to what was still referred to as Bella’s bedroom. Lolo, poor, dear Lolo, had begun to resemble Daddy in the way she scowled, closed the door. Bella said, ‘He has been mentioned in dispatches.’

‘That’s a huge thing,’ Harry said. ‘It’s like a decoration’.

How superfluous the term
decoration
, I thought.

‘Mother has no idea,’ Lolo said.

‘I think she understands more than all of us,’ I said.

Harry stood, hands in his pockets, looking out the bedroom window. ‘I saw you speaking to Rafter,’ he said to Bella.

‘Mr Rafter is the best friend we have,’ Bella said, avoiding my amused look. ‘He has told me exactly where we stand. He says it’s now a matter of weeks rather than months. Unless there are developments.’

‘I thought the fact they had all come to pay their respects rather meant that we had escaped all that,’ Lolo said.

‘Just means they were using the opportunity to sneak a look at their new property,’ said Bella dryly.

‘What developments has Rafter in mind?’ Harry enquired.

Bella lifted her chin. ‘Longstead is lost unless Iz marries Norman Penrose.’

They turned as one to me, but I had made my mind up and was ready for them. I just smiled.

‘The Penroses can do no wrong in these people’s eyes,’ Bella said. ‘If Iz marries Norman, then Longstead will not be touched. The Land Commission will back off. Mr Rafter says he can as good as guarantee that that is what will happen.’

They all looked to me again.

‘Do you
want
to marry Norman, Iz?’ asked Lolo.

‘I’ll marry him,’ I said.

Harry’s breath came out in a long, relieved hiss. ‘Well, were it not for the occasion, I’d suggest we drink champagne,’ he grinned.

‘Thank God. I’ll tell Rafter,’ Bella said.

They came and kissed me in turn. Bella and I left the bedroom last.

‘By the way, on the matter of you know who…’ she began.

‘Please.’

‘Thank
God
Nick made inquiries. It seems he is on a list of the most wanted men in Ireland,’ she said.

‘I don’t wish to discuss it.’

‘He’s got a price on his head, you know.’

‘
I don’t wish to discuss it!
’ I screamed and left her there, her front jutting out like an anthill.

My engagement to Norman did not have the effect of stopping the land agitation completely. Some local people who owed nothing to the Penroses felt that a great prize was being snatched from them and continued to lobby and to hold meetings and to demand action from their local representatives.

Although the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, I felt as if I were in my own war where survival depended on hard decisions and compromises. I saw Norman at least every Sunday, either when Mother and I went for luncheon to Mount Penrose, or when Norman and his father came to us. I wore an engagement ring that had been his mother’s and we went for walks, during which he spoke in steady tones about his ambitions and plans for Longstead. He had placed a notice announcing our engagement in the national newspapers. He had planned an engagement party, the first party in Mount Penrose in fifty years, he said. Although we had not yet been intimate, Norman seemed to already regard me as his wife.

I spent most of February clearing the detritus of winter from the shrubberies and digging beds in preparation for spring vegetables. I worked often without pause for four or five hours, as if afraid that stopping would give me time to think. I organised the annual spring clean of Longstead, the most thorough in memory, and helped carry out carpets and rugs on to the gravel and went back in to inspect, with dismay, the gaping holes in our floors where rot had thrived uninterrupted for fifty years. Norman sent over a carpenter and within two weeks new timbers had been laid and varnished.

‘These windows are all beyond repair,’ Norman said. ‘We’ll have to replace them.’

I did not protest. It seemed easier just to let him get on with it.

The party was held in Mount Penrose on a Saturday in late February, when gales ripped the length of Ireland. Bella and Nick arrived home, Bella now hugely pregnant and exhausted from a nine-hour sea crossing. They were well suited, Nick and Bella, she with her imperious demeanour and he with the kind of icy authority that sits on men who see their wishes enacted as laws. Mother’s stated intentions about her repatriation to Yorkshire were ignored by Bella, who advised that they were nothing more but the onset of dotage.

On the evening of the party, I put on a dress that had been made for me in Dublin and would eventually be paid for out of Daddy’s meagre estate. It was silk crepe, the colour of sunset, and fell from beneath a bow at the waist in tiers. The neck was square cut and the top half broken only by a single row of buttons. Nick drew in his breath when I came downstairs.