Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

As time went by, however, it slowly became clear that what I had done might well have saved my marriage. For Ronnie knew nothing of Dublin or the Four Courts Hotel and thought that my humours all sprang from womanly moods. My own behaviour had forced me to reconsider my opinion of him and to accept that if he had succumbed to a moment of indiscretion, then I, by my deliberate intent, had exceeded his impropriety by a distance. It was of no use to try and defend my actions by saying that Ronnie had driven me to them, or to plead justification for myself whilst condemning him. We were both human beings who had erred and who now had to make the best of what we had. Our relationship would be decent and dignified and would stand alone without reference or comparison to other experience. I would have to apply myself anew, forgetting everything that had gone before.

At thirteen, Hector was as tall as me and up to Ronnie’s shoulder. He now attended a tiny school in Monument, set up and paid for by the Catholic merchants of the town, but, soon, he would have to go away to secondary school, something I had been preparing for. Then Ronnie and I would be alone in the lighthouse.

One evening in mid-August, when Delaney and I were spending most of every day sewing name tags on to his clothes, Hector came in to where his father and I were sitting and said, ‘I don’t want to go to school in England.’

‘Oh, it’ll be fine, don’t you worry,’ Ronnie said. ‘I remember feeling exactly the same before I left Gortbeg.’

His mouth no longer needed the plastic support, but his face had set into a permanently skewed, almost fractured, look that, sometimes, in brief, unexpected moments, made him seem like a complete stranger.

Hector said, ‘I don’t mind leaving home, it’s just I don’t want to go to England.’

‘Well, I’m afraid, sir, that’s a pity, but you don’t have any more choice in the matter than I did. Sorry, old boy.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘I don’t wish to discuss it, Hector.’

‘Hector, why?’ I asked.

‘Only the real West Brits are still doing it, none of my friends are. They’re all going to school in Dublin.’

‘And learning gobbledygook,’ Ronnie said.

‘The people who still go come back to Ireland and have no friends here,’ Hector said. ‘A friend of mine in school has a sister who got married last year and she’d been to school in England. There wasn’t a single guest at the wedding who lived in Ireland.’

‘Thinking of getting married, are you old boy? Think carefully, if I was you,’ Ronnie drawled.

He had the Anglo-Irish tendency not to engage the specific, to reduce an issue to its most trivial and to forestall the inevitable by refusing to recognise it.

‘I’m not going.’

‘You’ve always been happy up to now about going, Hector. Everything’s arranged. Isn’t it a bit late to say this?’ I asked.

‘Excuse me, but I don’t see the point of a discussion which may give rise to false hope,’ said Ronnie. ‘Leave it, shall we?’

‘I’m discussing something with Hector.’

‘Which I deem most unwise.’

‘Nonetheless, I’m still discussing it.’

‘I forbid it.’

‘You… what?’

‘You heard me.’

I closed my eyes for a moment. ‘Hector, please leave the room.’

‘If you’re discussing me, I want to be here,’ said Hector.

‘Please.’

‘I’m not going.’

‘Leave the room!’

I was trembling as the boy left, shaking his head.

Ronnie looked at me with a supercilious expression. ‘Congratulations.’

‘How dare you! Is that all you can offer him when something huge in his life arises? A patronising smirk? Thinking of getting married, are you, old boy? What kind of a father are you?’

‘He’s a child,’ Ronnie sighed, weary of the matter.

‘He’s highly intelligent. What’s wrong with what he said? What’s wrong with going to school in Ireland? There must be half a dozen suitable schools. Why does he absolutely have to go to England just because you did?’

‘And my father, and his father.’

‘So?’

Ronnie’s eyes emptied. ‘Tradition may well have ended in your family with you, but here we still value it.’

‘What a despicable thing to say! You’re not capable of discussing the matter on its own merits without dragging in a personal attack!’

‘Does what I say not reflect the truth? Did you not ensure that everything your family held dear would end in one most unlovely debacle?’

‘You… pig!’

‘Am I?’

‘I hate you, Ronnie.’

‘Is that all you can say?’

‘What on earth does my family matter when it comes to deciding where Hector should go to school? For that matter, why should the fact that you and his grandfather went to one school mean that Hector must now go there too? I think, in fact, he’s right. This is Ireland, our own country. Why must everything still relate to England? You’re out of touch.’

‘We’re talking not just about tradition, but about standards, about the type of person you want as your friend, about connections. You think he’ll get that in any school here?’

‘The point he makes is that he will. What connections did you make that are now so vitally important?’

‘More than you imagine,’ Ronnie said, getting up and looking at his watch. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to.’

‘You’re ridiculous. We live here in a tiny lighthouse, we own less than one half of the land we did when I married you, we must watch how every penny is spent, you dart here and there like a mouse, trying to be the first to latch on to the newest person who comes into the area and has money. A lot of good going to school in England did you!’

Ronnie turned, his misaligned face all at once white and set.

‘If you’d had any style, we mightn’t be as we are. You let us all down, every day, simply by being you.’

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard me.’

I caught up a cup and hurled it; it bounced from his shoulder and smashed on the floor.

‘Get out!’

Ronnie stopped, then, eyes wild, he went to the stove, snatched up the pot of soup, and hurled it out through the open window into the sea. I picked up a vase and launched it for his head; although he ducked, it caught him high on his temple before disintegrating against the wall. Ronnie, panting, began to throw the furniture the same way as he had the soup. Picking up a heavy chair, I flung it at him, my strength a wonder. The chair caught him full square and he went down, winded. I picked up the breadboard, a generous piece of polished walnut, and went to stave in his head, but he caught my ankles and dragged hard so that I fell back and the board merely hit him in the chest. As if he had been interrupted in some serious task, Ronnie scrambled up and began to pitch every item of cutlery, glassware and crockery out the other kitchen window, many of them landing on his car that was parked below. I was bleeding from my mouth, yet I felt strangely empowered and elated. I picked up a pot stand and made a run at him. Ronnie went down again. I kicked him hard in the jaw. He winced and I wondered if I’d undone all the work of the unspeakable Mr Hedley Raven. I drew back again to kick harder.

‘Stop!’

I froze.

Hector was standing there.

‘You’ve both gone mad!’

The boy’s eyes were huge. Each time I tried to take a breath, my chest screamed.

‘It’s all right, Hector,’ said Ronnie, getting up, wincing. ‘We were just airing our differences.’

Hector looked from one of us to the other.

‘And have you stopped, now?’

‘Have we stopped, now?’ Ronnie asked, his teeth bared in pain.

‘Yes, we have stopped now,’ I panted.

In the months that followed, when Hector had gone away to school in England and I was forced to confront my true feelings for my husband, I always came back to our fight that day and, when I did, I always smiled. Like a storm that clears the atmosphere, I had felt immeasurably the better of it. My head was clear and, for the first time in years, I was happy. Although the gaps between our lovemaking were irregular — in itself not unusual for a marriage of a dozen years, I had read — Ronnie’s stamina on these occasions was always short, something I could live with, but with which, I imagined, a succession of mistresses might be impatient. I tried to remember him as I had first met him, his nonchalance with the everyday things of life, his sense of humour and his easy charm. For despite everything, we still had times of sweetness together. They coincided in the main with Ronnie’s business catastrophes. Stripped of his tricks by worry and impending disaster, I saw another Ronnie, devoid of winning ways or the need to dissemble. My wish in those times was perverse: that we could always be like this, an aspiration which involved never-ending misfortune; but at least then I would have him alone, which is to say, a man without pretensions, in need of love, who stayed at home and close to me, who came out the cliffs for walks and who listened as well as spoke.

‘Hector’s getting on well.’

We inched through a herd of port-bound cattle at the top of Captain Penny’s Road.

‘He likes his school.’

‘Not right for an only child to be at home on his own. Needs company.’

‘His every move is a mirror of you.’

‘Boys are like that. I remember how it was with my own father. Wanted to be him.’

We made our way forward as drovers beat and shouted.

‘May I say something?’ Ronnie asked. ‘I’d like to start again, you and me. From scratch. Go back to the very beginning. What do you say?’

I could not conceal my frustration. ‘I don’t know, Ronnie. Really, I don’t.’

‘Please.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

A few nights later I was reading in bed when a knock came to the door of the lantern bay.

‘May I come in?’

It was clear Ronnie had been drinking — not a common occurrence, but now manifested in a fixed, Langley-type grin. He sat on the side of my bed.

‘Big changes.’

‘Oh?’

‘You know. Me drawing a wage, Langley peeing himself, Hector gone. Big, big changes.’

‘Change can be good.’

Ronnie grinned. ‘You don’t change though. You just get more beautiful.’

I felt my eyes brim. Ronnie sat on the bedside, then bent down and we kissed.

‘That was good,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘D’you want to know something? D’you know when I wanted you the most?’

‘I can’t imagine.’

‘When we fought… you know, before Hector went away. I thought you were magnificent. I couldn’t work out why we hadn’t done it before, got all the bad stuff out in the open. I wanted to come up that night, break down the door and ravage you. Sorry, but it’s the truth.’

‘You’ve been drinking, Ronnie.’

He was now lying on the covers, stroking my neck.

‘Sometimes drink brings out the truth.’

I looked at him, at his warm eyes, his still somehow inviting skin. With drink, he lacked the guile of the day-to-day Ronnie, so that all was left was a quite charming if tipsy, middle-aged man.

‘I don’t want to be hurt again, Ronnie.’

‘You won’t be, ever, I swear.’

‘I wish I could believe you.’

‘That’s all finished. I was a fool, I know I was, but I’ve changed. And apart from being even more beautiful, so have you, I think.’

He had a tenacity at such moments lacking in all the other aspects of his life.

‘You are beautiful,’ he murmured, baring my shoulders and kissing them. ‘So bloody lovely.’

1963

It was a time of change. Factories were built outside Monument, people acquired cars and houses began to appear on recently green fields, almost as far as the holy well on Captain Penny’s Road. When Hector stepped from the boat at Easter, it took me a moment to recognise him, six feet tall and twice as broad as I remembered. I saw girls on the wharf suck in their breaths.

‘Hector!’

He smiled and held me.

‘You’re enormous!’

‘I’m ravenous.’

‘Your old mother had reckoned as much. Let’s go home.’

We drove out Captain Penny’s Road and took the fork for Sibrille. The grass had that glistening, April newness. In some places, milk herds had just been let out after their winter’s confinement and, muddied and shed stained, bucked their way across green meadows.