Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

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.’

But Peppy became flustered now, for she thought that she had said the wrong thing. She said,

‘Oh, God, I am sorry, Iz. What I meant to say was that I was never as beautiful as you, and so I expect you know far more about love than I do — and that’s not what I meant to say either.’

‘I understand.’

‘Do you? You see, some people never quite get the hang of it and I’m an example. I have other things, though, and I’ve never been one to sit and think of how it might have been. But come on, any more of this and we shall both be sniffling and there’s nothing worse. Tell me. What are you calling it?’

‘His name is Hector,’ I said.

1946

Where I had grown up, in the Meath countryside more than an hour’s drive from Dublin, all our shopping had been done in the store of the nearby village. The Shaws, on the other hand, never shopped in Sibrille, but bought everything in Monument. Once a week, Ronnie drove me to town, where I handed in my grocery order at the counter of Wise’s, the grocers, and then made my way up into the teeming section known as Balaklava where at the tiny, fly-blown premises of Shortcourse, the butchers, I ordered our meat.

In those first months, being in Monument pierced me, but, in time, she became as I had thought of her on my very first visit: a port that was more Mediterranean than Irish, not just because of the sense of relative plenty in an Ireland that was striving to survive on war rations, nor because of the exotic faces one encountered when ships were in, but because Monument herself, in her architecture of terraces and arched doorways, her labyrinthine streets, lanes, courtyards and back steps and her almost Moorish churches discovered behind an ancient palisade or beyond a rusting portcullis might well have been forged in a distant land and floated in one foggy morning from the sea.

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.’

1947 – 49

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.