Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

He nodded slowly. ‘Then that’s what we’ll do. We’ll live our dream.’

‘When?’

‘As soon as we can. A couple of weeks.’

I kissed him as though I could never kiss him enough, or again. I wished we could go to sleep in that little room, warm and safe, and that, when we woke, we would be in a place where our dreams would begin.

Three days later, a letter arrived from Bella.

Darling Iz,

This has to be brief, because Nick says I must be careful about what I put down on paper.

Please, please believe me when I say that the person you are seeing is HIGHLY UNSUITABLE. I implore you to believe me. Nick has contacts who have told him that EVERY MOVEMENT IS BEING WATCHED. The person in question is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. So if our friendship stands for anything, just trust me in what I say.

Your loving sister, Bella.

Sick with fear for what might be about to happen to Frank, I walked into the village. We had arranged to meet in a week’s time in Dublin, at Kingsbridge railway station, and to go from there on the night mail boat to London. In the post office in Tirmon I filled out a telegram form: COME UP URGENT IZ.

Then I remembered Bella’s letter. Every movement is being watched. I felt the eyes of the post-mistress, into whose hands I was about to entrust the telegram. She lived in the house at the end of the village nearest to where our barn had been set alight. I suddenly understood the power of the alliances drawn up against us: those who wanted to grab Longstead; the Land Commission; their acquiescent allies in the public service, such as the woman in this post office; and now the guards, not to mention the IRA. I crumpled the form, threw it in a wastepaper basket, then realising what I had done, retrieved it and left the tiny shop and its open-mouthed custodian.

That afternoon, although our fuel was scarce and kept for dire emergencies, I took the car out and drove towards Dublin. I was terrified. I was sure that Bella had made the situation far worse for Frank with her enquiries. But if his every movement was being watched, then a telegram to him would be intercepted. In a post office in a tiny village on the outskirts of Dublin, I sent a telegram to Tom King, c/o Monumentals rugby club, with the message, COME TO LONGSTEAD SOONEST IZ.

I had no idea if it would be delivered. At home, exhausted beyond utterance, I went to bed and lay there, shaking, wondering what we had done to deserve the wrath of the world.

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.’

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.