Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

Bella’s face assumed a slow, insouciant smile. ‘I don’t think so, darling. My taste in men is somewhat different.’

‘You mean married.’

Bella ran out her tongue and played it on the crown of her upper lip. ‘Why not?’

I felt myself foundering. ‘What happens if you get caught?’

Bella looked at me from drowsy eyes. ‘London is full of wealthy men with wives in the country. They look after you.’

‘Please don’t get hurt!’ I blurted, unable to stop myself.

‘Don’t worry about me,’ Bella said and stretched like a beautiful, pampered cat. She put her cup and saucer down and looked at me with dreamy curiosity. ‘May I say something about Norman without having my head bitten off?’

‘Say it.’

‘Norman is a catch. There is a war. You are a young girl without experience and, if I may say so, few prospects. Forget your childish feelings for Norman. When you’re twenty-five and he’s thirty-five, or whatever, it will be very different. Listen to the voice of experience. He admires you greatly.’

‘And I find him lacking in everything I admire.’

‘The reality, of course, is that he lacks nothing. He farms nearly two thousand acres. They own half of Belfast.’

‘Does love mean nothing to you?’

Bella’s face became spiny. ‘What do you know about love? Do you think that’s all there is in life? Do you think you can eat love and it can keep you warm? Look at this place! When will you grow up?’

Outside, Mr Rafter had materialised and was straining on a rope with Harry.

‘I wonder is this the last time?’ I said.

‘Why?’ asked Bella sharply.

‘Mother says we are like a ship without a captain, that Longstead is drifting.’

‘“Mother says’”. What nonsense! Allan will be Longstead’s captain.’

‘If he comes home.’

‘How do you mean, “if”’? Of course he’ll come home — he has to.’

‘He’s fighting a war, Bella.’

‘You make life so complicated!’ she cried. ‘Certain things are understood. Allan will come home, Longstead will still be here and you will come to realise that the sun rises every morning, with or without love.’

I walked through fields that afternoon, down by the lake and over meadows where lambs leapt and tumbled, into woods where our hives were found, through natural pergolas of wild roses and woodbine, and sat on a boulder by a copse from which Longstead could be picked out in the distance. The copse was surrounded by a waist-high wall of large, uneven stones that incorporated a fairy mound where oak trees grew at eccentric angles. The dead had been laid here over millennia, the bodies of warriors brought on handcarts from battle, great chieftains in their cloaks and breastplates and whole clans that had perished in epidemics. No one disturbed a fairy mound lest they troubled the dead, not even my brothers, who used to shoot pigeons here at dusk; they never stood on the mound itself but took up their positions on the perimeter.

Why, as the youngest, I should have to be the worrier, I did not understand. Bella — beautiful, worshipped — worried only for herself. Lolo, who had married a bishop’s son and lived in Fermanagh, would arrive later that day and the whole house would echo to her empty chatter. I was, it seemed, the only person competent to worry. For now, on a day of great peace and confident expectation, as swallows flew high, as men spoke happily about the hay that would be saved, as the whole bounty of the earth seemed to eddy deliciously in the warm air, I sat shivering, my back clammy from a fear I could not name.

Identical twin sisters, the unmarried Misses Carr, who lived a few miles from us and hunted their own pack of harriers, arrived with baskets of home baked biscuits. They always dressed the same, and wore the same shade of lipstick; even their hunters were picked so that no one could tell one from the other. The Misses Carr had a knack of always being in the thick of everything: funerals, christenings, parties. Although my father said they were the most irritating women he had ever met, they were among the few whom Mother counted as her friends.

Daddy’s appearance at seven that evening marked the formal opening of proceedings. His stiff, white shirt-front and collar seemed an ominous extension of his pallid face. He looked so old. Lifted into his armchair by Harry and placed by the drawing room fireplace with a glass of champagne, he presided over the embryonic gathering with a lopsided smile.

‘You look so dashing, Daddy!’

Bella, radiant in a dress of azure voile, her hair piled on her head, her shoulders bare and lovely, bent and kissed him.

‘You’re good enough to eat, my dear. You both are.’ My father’s strong voice still belied his appearance.

Bella’s eyes saw me with amusement. ‘Our Iz has turned into quite the young woman, hasn’t she, Daddy?’

‘Iz will be here when you’ll all have gone’, said my father.

‘Oh.’

‘Something wrong, Iz?’

‘Who’s that man?’ I asked to switch the conversation.

‘Him?’ Bella was unreliable when looking into the middle distance, for her weak eyesight made her peer, a process that robbed her of her beauty. ‘Oh, he’s Ronnie Shaw! He’s fun.’ She dropped her voice. ‘But they’re broke.’

The man’s profile was sharp and clean and his dark hair swept back from a wide forehead.

‘Langley Shaw’s son,’ said Daddy. ‘His mother is a wonderful woman to have put up with Langley.’

‘How “put up with”’? I asked.

‘Oh, generally,’ said my father, vague all at once. ‘He’s come up a long way tonight. From Monument.’

‘He’s got a sports car,’ Bella said. ‘I’ll go and get him.’

‘Mr Seston!’

Norman Penrose was being brought over by Harry. I always went through the same sequence of reactions with Norman: I was at first struck by how tall and handsome he was, immediately followed by a qualification about his eyes, something to do with their ability to be simultaneously intense and void, followed by an endless refining of my first impression until all I was left with was a shell of the original.

‘You look so well, sir,’ Norman said.

Daddy smiled sadly. ‘How’s your father, Norman? Has he got over your poor mother yet? God, but she was a lovely woman. That was a dreadful blow to him to have her taken like that. Would he not come tonight?’

‘He’s in Dublin. Business, I’m afraid.’

‘I used to like Dublin, you know. Liked lunch in my club. But liked coming home here better.’

‘A good judge as always,’ Norman said and then looked at me with a cautious smile. ‘Ismay?’

‘Norman.’

‘Am I allowed a dance tonight?’

‘By all means.’

‘Then that will be the highlight of my evening.’

‘I’ll be keeping a close eye on both of you,’ Harry said.

‘How is Mount Penrose?’ Daddy asked. ‘Are you having any trouble from these agitators?’

‘Well, after a fashion, although I’ve heard it said that the main thing that agitates them is the lack of porter.’

Bella laughed and fanned herself.

‘I daresay, but it has to be stopped before it grows out of control,’ Daddy said.

Norman’s lips became two grim lines.

‘There was a meeting near Grange last week, torches and banners. My father says it’s all Mr de Valera.’

Daddy shook his head in despair. ‘Mr de Valera, Mr de Valera. Is there any end to the trouble caused by Mr de Valera?’

‘At least he’s cracking down on the IRA,’ Norman said.

‘Hah! Only after they were allowed to steal the Irish Army’s entire stock of ammunition!’ Daddy cried. ‘Law and order went out the window in this country in 1922. I could have lived anywhere in the world, Australia, the American Midwest, but I came back here. Now I think I made the wrong decision.’