Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘It’s my house, Ronnie.’

‘I only wanted to surprise you.’

‘She’s even chosen the curtain material.’

‘My dear, please.’ Ronnie could become so like Langley. ‘She’s apparently quite famous for curtains. I mean, you’ve seen Main.’

‘I’m sure Rosa Santry did not give Mrs De Vere carte blanche,’ I said. ‘I want to be consulted.’

Ronnie sighed. ‘As you wish.’

Suddenly, we had a new Austin car, and, for the first time, a horse trailer to go behind it. And then, one night, on the Deilt side of Monument, Ronnie almost died.

He’d been driving too fast. The car had skidded off the road, then somersaulted down a ravine where, crushed and twisted, it had lain for half the night before being found. Ronnie spent six weeks in Dublin’s Mater Hospital, the first two of them fighting for his life. A London neurosurgeon had flown in and operated on his head. His mouth was rebuilt. They doubted if he would ever walk again.

For days, I sat beside his hospital bed, looking at the tubes running from the head and arms, the leaping chest. During those days, both holding Ronnie’s hand and in the chapel to the hospital, I prayed for his sparing so that my son could have a father and me a husband.

He went to a nursing home after the Mater and came home, a supporting plate in his mouth, ten weeks to the day of the crash. He was so thin that one could almost see through him. Three times a week, he needed to be driven into Monument for physiotherapy.

‘I shall recover, you know,’ he said as we approached the new houses on the fringe of town. He was licking at the stiff, plastic support that held up the near side of his mouth. He said, ‘They say I just need time.’

‘Of course you will recover,’ I said and reached over to him.

Ronnie caught my hand and kissed it, over and over.

‘The thought of you and Hector kept me going,’ he said as we drove down Long Quay. ‘Even when I was out cold, I was thinking of you two.’

‘Hector is beside himself with excitement that you’re home,’ I said.

‘I’ve had a lot of time on the flat of my back to work things out,’ Ronnie said. ‘I need to become a lot more active in the auctioneering business.’

‘First of all you need to get your full health back,’ I said, although since he had come home I had not shown him the pile of bills that had accumulated in his absence.

‘There’s big money to be made,’ Ronnie said. ‘Land is the key, mark my words.’

I didn’t argue, since I knew nothing about business or auctioneering; yet my own father had once been a businessman and had even in ill health demonstrated a shrewdness that Ronnie seemed to lack — which, I had to admit, was part of Ronnie’s appeal.

Ronnie was not home a month when his father suffered a bad seizure. Old and very deaf, Langley had sat mostly in the sitting room of his house reading bound volumes of Guide to the Turf. Meals were served to him on a tray by Delaney. I could not remember the last time he and I had had a conversation. Then, one afternoon, Delaney came screaming across the narrow gap, her eyes wild. I followed her back in and passed Stonely, lurking in the hall, and saw Langley lying rigid by his armchair, his eyes fluttering and spittle in a white foam lathering his mouth.

‘Oh sweet mother of God,’ Delaney said and fell to her knees, batting the air around his head with helpless hands. ‘He’s dead!’

He wasn’t, but he would never be the same again. Medication was prescribed, but his mind, never very giving, now seemed to function less than half the time he was awake. He began to wet himself. A nurse was hired, a formidable woman who at once began to feud with Delaney. Langley’s bed was moved into the sitting room, the nurse moved into Langley and Peppy’s old bedroom and demanded that her meals be served in the front room, on the best china.

1952 – 3

When Ronnie walked the farms of prospective clients or drove into Monument on provisioning trips, he had begun to take Hector with him. On dim evenings when they arrived home, glowing from the pleasure of each other, I watched in awe at the miracle that had been wrought.

Although Hector was growing up in the company of adults — instead of going to school, he was receiving lessons from a retired schoolteacher in Sibrille — I did see to it that he met other children. We were friendly with Jack and Rosa Santry, the couple who lived in Main at the other side of Monument. A few months before, when a new bridge had been built across the Thom near Main to replace the one that had been swept away in floods, it had with great ceremony been named Jack Santry Bridge. We had brought Hector to the party and he had hit it off with Kevin Santry, Jack and Rosa’s son.

Ronnie had begun to advertise himself as an auctioneer in the Monument Gazette, the local newspaper that was read widely in the county. And, for a while, he was quite busy, selling farms by public auction, in particular those farms of deceased or otherwise departed Anglos, people he had known socially and whose relicts valued the probity of Captain Ronnie Shaw, MBVI. However, after a year of this activity, instead of simply acting as auctioneer, he went and bought the land himself, using the last of Peppy’s money, with the plan to sell on at a huge profit; alas, the client failed to spring and Ronnie was forced to unload his purchase at a loss. As if this misjudgement was not enough, however, he straight away tried to gamble his way out of the position by repeating the mistake and buying another farm. I knew nothing until he came home one day, desolate, and told me how he had been ‘unlucky’, the expression most used to explain a crisis. We sat on rocks watching the sea, resolute and unceasing. He had paid too much, been caught again, this time could not unload. Unlucky. The bank was demanding he sell the land for whatever he could get.

‘We’re in trouble,’ he said. ‘We need a breathing space.’

‘Might we lose the lighthouse?’

‘You can never tell where something like this will end.’

I thought of Hector and of how happy he was growing up in Sibrille.

‘There is the house in Dublin,’ Ronnie said.

‘That was your mother’s gift to me,’ I said gently, for I could not bear to think of selling a gift from someone so dear as Peppy.

‘Of course. But perhaps it’s better have a roof over our heads here than over someone else’s head in Dublin,’ Ronnie said.

That night we made love in the lantern bay as seagulls with unflinching eyes hovered by the windows. Two days later, I agreed to sell the house in Dublin.

‘I’ll talk to Mr Coad,’ I said.

Ronnie made a surprised face. ‘We always use the other chap, what’s his name. Beagle.’

‘Your mother used Coad.’

‘They’re all robbers, one way or another,’ Ronnie said.

When I went in to Monument and told old Mr Coad of my decision, he expressed the opinion that the survey map outlining the exact boundaries of the house in Dublin and its grounds was very rough and ready — good enough, perhaps, for the requirements of the time in which it had been purchased, but not up to scratch for 1953. He suggested that prior to instructing an auctioneer, a surveyor be employed and that he would go to Dublin to instruct this person. He suggested that I come too.

In order to make the eight o’clock Dublin train, we all got up at half past six and drove into Monument in the darkness. Hector was intensely wound up. He was going to stay the night at Main with Kevin Santry, his first night away from home. Ronnie, helped by Hector, carried my overnight case to the train carriage. It was early spring and people still wore their topcoats.

‘Where’s Coad?’ Ronnie asked.

‘Probably on the train,’ I said.

Ronnie put down the case and caught me around the waist. ‘You don’t get up to any mischief up there, you hear?’ he said and made his eyes slide into the corners of their sockets.

I laughed and as we kissed I could taste salt on his lips. I suddenly hated leaving. Hector turned up his face for me and I realised that I didn’t have to bend nearly as far to kiss him as I once had.

‘I don’t have to go…’ I began.

Ronnie’s eyes popped. ‘Yes, you do! We’ve all got up in the dark!’

We kissed again.

‘I’ll telephone you from my hotel before you go to bed,’ I promised Hector.’

A tall, awkward looking young man with large, unaligned eyes was standing at the door to the train.

‘Mrs Shaw?’

‘I am Mrs Shaw.’

‘Forgive me, but I am Richard Coad,’ he said. ‘My father is unwell and has asked that I accompany you to Dublin. I am his apprentice.’

I shook his hand, Ronnie bid him a gruff good morning, then the whistle sounded and I got on board and hurried to my seat so that I could wave to Ronnie and Hector through the window.

We began to move, and as Ronnie and Hector, hand in hand, tried to keep up, then fell away, Mr Coad made a fuss of putting my coat up on the rack above the carriage seat and of making sure I was seated facing my preferred direction.

‘Thank you, Mr Coad,’ I said.

He sat opposite me. ‘I would be extraordinarily grateful if you saw fit to call me Dick.’

‘Very well. On condition that you call me Iz.’

He blinked and reddened. ‘I had no intention for a moment of suggesting…’

‘It’s short for Ismay,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said as if a long-standing question had been resolved.

Despite his age, his hairline had already begun to recede. I would not have been surprised to learn that I was the first client he had been let loose on. We chatted about Peppy’s death and about the Shaws.

‘The Shaws came to Ardnish in either 1673 or ’74, you know,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘John Shaw, an infantryman. He’d been a cooper in Devon and had, it would appear, been forced to enlist.’

We were steaming through the foothills of the Deilt Mountains, past a wooded area known as Glane. Dick’s uncoordinated eyes roved. His father had given him an office beside his own above the shop in Mead Street where his mother and sister sold stationery.

‘Then there is a gap until 1687. John Shaw Esquire takes a lease of a thousand acres on the Ardnish peninsula — “for so long as he wisheth” — from the Earl of Ardnish and Eillne — a title now long extinct — at a rent of £25 per annum, quite a lot of money in those days.’

Smoke from the cigarette streamed into Dick’s wild, left eye as we forged through a field of white cattle.

‘That’s how it all began,’ he said, his cigarette moving with each word, ‘that’s the Shaw history.’

‘You take history very seriously, Dick.’

Dick clapped his chest and chuckled. ‘Too seriously for my own good, my mother says, always asking why I spend my time worming through parchments. I have this sense of history, ever since I first read the account of the Peloponnesian War.’

The door of the carriage slid open and a steward brought in trays with tea and toast.

‘The invention of history as a recorded subject,’ he continued and flamed another cigarette. ‘We’re all the heirs of Thucydides, we historians, you know. The thing to remember is that at the beginning — and I’m talking about the very beginning, which is to say, let me be accurate, 431 B.C. — Pericles had no intention of offering battle to the Spartans. He knew he had the superior navy, so it was all down to a waiting game. Close the net at sea, block the Gulf of Corinth, Bob’s your uncle. I’m boring you.’

‘On the contrary. Please.’

‘Then came the plague.’ Dick’s young face became grim. ‘Is there any fairness in nature?’

‘Very little,’ I said, ‘yet in the end, nature is all we are left to rely on.’

‘I rest my case,’ Dick said. ‘One third of all the troops died, you know, including Pericles himself. What might have happened had he lived, led on? In that aberration of nature lay the fatal undermining of the Athenian state, although it would take another twenty-seven years to come about. What statesman could have bargained for that? As he lay dying, could Pericles possibly have imagined that in a few short years, the Persians would be funding the Spartan war effort? I mean, even Hippocrates himself could not match Pericles for vision. He was too slow, Hippocrates!’

‘I see.’

‘Thirty-five thousand Athenians killed at Syracuse alone!’ Dick’s eyes rolled in their separate conventions. ‘Are you quite sure you want to sell this property?’