Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘This can’t go on,’ I said one evening.

Earlier, a most apologetic man had come around and had cut off the telephone.

‘We should leave. Begin again.’

‘How?’

‘We should sell here and move to Dublin.’

He looked at me. ‘You’re serious.’

‘What’s the point of staying? There’s a fine house in Dublin. We’re not known there. You could get a job — doing something other than auctioneering.’

Ronnie’s eyes blinked at speed. ‘It’s the only thing I know.’

‘You weren’t an auctioneer in the army.’

‘That was more than twenty years ago.’

‘Ronnie, it’s no reflection on you, but it hasn’t been the greatest success. It’s time to rethink, move on. People do it the whole time. A fresh start.’

‘I’ve never thought of living anywhere else. It seems… it seems wrong somehow. The fact is, I like living here.’

‘So do I, Ronnie.’

No more was said. The great rush of light in late April and in May seemed to drive our problems before it. Heat grew back into the cliffs. Seabirds hatched and hunted. One morning after rain, the whole coastline was a blaze of colour. Then Ronnie came in very late; it was two, a night of a bright moon and a restless, undulating sea. I heard him go into his room downstairs, for although our sleeping apart was not invariable, we had, I think, both come to like the independence of it.

‘You were late,’ I said the next morning.

Ronnie looked up from pouring tea, his face caught by an old but to me disturbing confidence.

‘We may not be dead yet,’ he said.

‘Oh.’

He nodded, poured for me. ‘A farm. A big one. I think I’ll get the sale.’

‘Whose?’

‘I’d rather not say till it’s in the bag.’

‘Well… that’s very good.’

‘We’ll turn the corner here, just you wait and see,’ Ronnie said and winked.

It was this prospect of success rather than our enduring climate of failure that made my mind up. Apart from the threat of legal action from the Gargan business that had not gone away, we had on countless occasions been here before. Ronnie would get this farm to sell, and the commission would come in, and he would begin again to tangle, as they had it in Monument, and spend night and day seducing those with land to sell or with money to buy it, and our problems would be put into suspension until the next crisis came along, except that we would by then be that much older. I didn’t say anything to Ronnie, but a week later, on a warm June afternoon, I drove into Monument to meet Dick Coad.

‘This place…’ he said vaguely, waving his hand over the disorder. His father had died some years before and Dick alone now ran the practise. Lifting a stack of files from a chair, he placed them up like sandbags on his already fortified desk. Smoke streamed into his left eye in an endearing recapturing of the past. He had little remaining head hair and had become thinner, a development that made him look even more eccentric. Fishing around on his desk, perhaps for some documentation relevant to me, he abandoned the search, removed his cigarette from his mouth and tipped its impending ash into the palm of his left hand.

‘Forgive me.’

‘How are you, Dick?’

‘I am, thank God, uncommonly well, and if I may say so, if appearances mean anything, so are you, Iz.’

I caught in the air between us the merest whiff of alcohol. He said,

‘I’ve just brought out a book, you know. The History of Monument and District . Took me all of ten years.’

‘Oh. And is it under your own name?’

‘Indeed it is. Richard Coad. It can be found in the library and in the tourist office.’

I allowed a small and respectful moment of silence for his achievement.

‘Dick, we have decided to move to Dublin.’

‘Ah.’

‘Nothing remains here to keep us, really, our son Hector is in the British Army, Ronnie’s father is in the County Home and quite demented, poor man, knows no one. It is time for a fresh start.’

‘So you would…’

‘Sell the lighthouse.’

‘And…’

‘Move into my house in Dublin. Which is why I am here, to enquire about what needs to be done in order to make it vacant for us.’

‘Nothing too arduous, rest assured.’ Dick flamed another cigarette to life. ‘Tell me, what regiment did Hector go into?’

‘Royal Green Jackets.’

‘Ah, yes, old Captain Shaw’s regiment. They fought at Waterloo, you know. They actually wore green jackets, hence the name. What a grand tradition! Crimea and then the Cape. Old Captain Shaw would not have actually fought — if I tell a lie, forgive me — but I don’t believe he ever saw action. But the regimental lore! Inescapable! Light infantry charging cannon side by side with cavalry. Brave horses that could face down fire. Splendid. Many of such horses shipped out from around Monument, you know, the progeny of mares owned by small farmers. Massive steads with hearts as big as buckets. Blood going back to the time of Cúchulainn. The joy of it!’

Dick’s eyes rolled in their unilateral orbits.

‘I would have some concerns about your proposal, Iz.’

‘Oh?’

‘Which I would only express in the light of our acquaintance — one I greatly value — and the element of trust I still feel I must discharge on behalf of the late Mrs Shaw, whose memory my late father always retained with great affection, God rest them both.’

‘Ronnie and I have been through a lot, but we’re still together.’

‘No less than an example to everyone — but who am I to talk, without a wife to my name? Yet the principle of the original bequest remains. How long is it since we went to Dublin that day? Eight years?’

‘Thirteen.’

‘Heavens above! Of course, how could you forget and the circumstances in which you came home? I lit candles that night in Dublin for the child. And for you. Poor Jennings passed on, you know. Ah yes, fell down dead during an inspection, poor fellow. He was a gentleman.’

‘He was. Dick, this is not like selling the house, it is going to be our home. My home.’

‘Quite. However, legislation has been passed recently and there is lots more of it on the go — God knows how anyone can keep abreast — which complicates questions of ownership. A wife can no longer be put out on the street, thank God, on the basis that the house is no longer hers. Man and wife living in a house confers rights of joint ownership regardless of whose name is on the deeds. And thus the same would apply should you move to Dublin. It is your house now, but were it to become the home of yourself and Captain Shaw, then it would no longer be your house in the way Peppy intended.’

‘Whose house would it be?’

‘Half of it would be his.’ Dick’s mournful eyes swivelled. ‘I’m sorry. You must of course be free to live wheresoever you choose, I’m just like a tiresome old uncle who has your best interests at heart.’

‘I’m older than you,’ I said and laughed.

‘Nevertheless.’

‘What do I do now?’

‘Think about it and we’ll have another chat.’

He was a man whose dogged adherence to a principle was both his greatest asset and what limited him most, for on the one hand he was right, I thought as I drove home — the house in Dublin was my safety net; but, then again, who didn’t change over years, and why should Peppy’s bequest be made an obstacle rather than grasped as an opportunity? Heat burned into the little car. In fields either side, hay was being turned, or ricked, or drawn in for the distant winter. Men worked, sleeves rolled to the elbow, or in some cases they had taken off their shirts so that their torsos looked piebald, milk-white bodies from which sprang nutty forearms and necks. Heat stood over the causeway in undulating veils as I drove in. Ronnie’s car was parked around the back of the lighthouse, a surprise, since he had said that morning he would be gone all day.