Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘How’s the boss?’

‘In good form, thank you, although he worries about the war.’

‘War or no war, it’s not a bad time of the year, if he could get out, although there was a breeze yesterday that would cut the backbone off you.’

His words floated behind Mother’s inbound steps. Men in brown dustcoats attended behind counters as we forged through the sudden collision of aromas in the elongated shop. Smoked ham gave way to coffee which yielded in turn to timber, polish, rope, cured lamb fleece, rubber.

‘Mr Rafter, we are having some people in.’ Mother would never use the word ‘party’. ‘Here is the list. We require champagne.’

‘Certainly.’

‘And candles. Have I written down candles? I’m losing my mind these days.’

Mr Rafter consulted the scrap of paper which Mother had taken all of two minutes to draw up before we had left.

‘I don’t see…’ The grocer frowned, slow to be the one to suggest an omission. ‘How many candles might be required?’

‘I haven’t the faintest idea, I simply remember the last occasion, before the electricity, Lolo’s birthday. Every room must have needed two dozen. How many rooms are there? Iz! Do I have to do this completely on my own?’

This was the first I had heard of candles. I made a rough calculation.

‘I’ll put down for a gross of the good ones, just to be sure,’ said Mr Rafter, writing with a pencil into a reassuringly permanent order book.

Mother was pulling vaguely at the corners of a bolt of cloth.

‘Italian, silk and wool. The Pope himself has his shirts made from it. Fifteen shillings a yard, ma’m,’ said Mr Rafter.

I could see Mother’s interest retreat before the price. Too much money, although money was something she never discussed with Mr Rafter. She looked at him as if he had said something that had puzzled her.

‘We need bunting,’ she said.

‘Bunting,’ Mr Rafter repeated, but his pencil remained still.

‘In the porch’, said Mother.

It was not easy to wrong foot Mr Rafter.

‘Coloured paper streamers,’ I said and Mr Rafter said Ah and wrote.

‘And huge quantities of bread for sandwiches,’ Mother said, ‘isn’t that all?

She had now reached the rear door to the yard of the premises where oats and meal were stored. Her eyes took in shelves, as if checking for change or movement since her last visit; she turned and at a quickened pace retraced her steps by way of sugar bins and tea chests and labelled drawers piled to the roof.

‘And some staff to hand out, as you so kindly provided before, and teapots. As I remember, we must have borrowed them from you or else, if we did buy them, then we’ve lost them, which I would imagine is impossible, you can’t lose twenty teapots, although nothing would surprise me any more.’

She halted.

‘You arranged the band,’ Mr Rafter.

‘Indeed I did, Ma’am, I collected them off the train myself.’

‘Are they still..?’

‘Going strong. I seem to remember they were to everyone’s satisfaction.’

‘They seemed perfectly adequate. Very well, if you could please…’

‘I’ll see to it this morning.’

We had reached the door where one of the young men in brown coats had leapt forward to hold it open.

‘Put down fish paste’, Mother said.

‘Fish paste.’ Mr Rafter wrote in solemn fashion. ‘And the champagne?’

‘Just make sure it’s good.’

‘Of course’, said Mr Rafter, stepping out after us, ‘but will there be much required?’

Mother stared at the shopkeeper. Part of her expected Mr Rafter to know the answer to such a question without his having to ask. We did not entertain very often, but when we did, he should have known that it followed an invariable pattern. At the same time, she considered the question as verging on the impertinent and was not prepared to discuss with a grocer outside his shop how many people we were having in or how much champagne they might drink. And finally, I knew — and knew that Mr Rafter also knew — that Mother had not until that moment attempted to work out how many people might, in fact, be coming to Bella’s party.

‘Sufficient, Mr Rafter,’ she said and swept towards our car, me hurrying behind her.

I had been to school in Wales. In a tradition initiated by my sister, Lolo, and continued by Bella, three times a year I had boarded the mail boat and sailed to Holyhead. I was meant to have gone on after school, as Bella had, to Paris and Geneva, where one learned to cook and to be in all ways perfect, but there was a war and so I had attended an academy for those purposes in Dublin. My brothers too had been to a minor English public school, with the result, probably intended, that none of us knew very many of the local people around Tirmon, as if Tirmon was not the place we lived but merely dropped in to during holidays. This structured aloofness bound Anglo-Irish society to itself; by necessity we reached to the far corners of Ireland for our friends, as if we Anglo-Irish were all related by virtue of ascendancy, inter-marriage and religion, and above all by our resolute non-Irishness. If any one thing defined us, that was it. We knew what we were not, and every action and attitude flowed from this fact. We had suffered the onset of Irish independence by, in the main, ignoring it. That we no longer controlled the country in which we lived or that we had been allowed up to now to continue as before seemed to have occurred to no one. We were, of course, not English either, a more awkward truth. The native Irish had only us to go on as an example of Englishness and we gave full value for money in playing the part; but when we went to England or to Wales, we understood that to the English or the Welsh we were Irish. We were, in fact, part of a new race, born of successive plantations from the Middle Ages, but a race that had, by even the most modest standards, failed. We had failed to keep the land we had been sent to settle. Failed to find a way of living with the people we had been sent to rule.

On the morning of the big day, Mother, having seen my father installed in the morning room, took her easel, pallet and paints and disappeared in her pony trap. She would not return, I knew, until evening, for like a child that closes its eyes to hide from monsters, once out of sight of all the bustle and preparation, she would feel safe. Harry, who had come home the day before, was outside, helping to haul up a tent, as Mr Rafter and relays of his men carried in hampers. Harry had always been the one who had made the jokes and livened up the atmosphere at meal times and made Daddy laugh.

‘I’ve never seen so much food,’ I said.

Bella, in a long dress of cool, baggy sleeves, dragged on her cigarette. She said, ‘It will all go to the pigs tomorrow, like the last time.’

‘Better than being stuck for enough.’

‘Miss Practical. Perhaps you might be practical enough to pour the tea.’

We sat in what was called the sunroom, a lean-to at the gable of the house, whose sun was about to be blotted out by the rising tent.

‘By the way…’

Bella drew her legs in beneath her and reached for her cup.

‘I met Norman last night and he was very keen to know that you would be here tonight.’

‘Really.’

‘Miss Ice. Really . Well yes, he was, really . You’re such a little fool.’

Norman Penrose lived with his father on a thriving estate outside the village of Grange, seven miles distant. In his early thirties, charming and unfailingly courteous in his offers in the problems of Longstead, he had always been generous and helpful. And yet, for all his excellent points, Norman made my flesh crawl.

‘I’m very sorry, Bella,’ I said thinly. ‘I didn’t realise that you were so touchy about Norman. Maybe it’s you he’s really after.’