Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

Daddy’s health took a turn for the worst. He must have once been a strong man, for everyone said that his ongoing survival was unprecedented. It was appalling to watch. He went yellow. Light as a child, occasionally he asked for Allan, or made references to jobs to be done about the place, or asked questions about the price of cattle. As the doctor’s visits became part of our days, Mr Rafter also began to appear, usually in the late afternoon. A bond had formed between Daddy and Rafter, and now, as the breaking of that bond approached, the grocer came up and calmly dealt with Daddy’s ever more rambling questions.

At some stage in this inexorable decline, I became aware that outside the walls of Longstead, local politics were moving steadily against us. ‘Agitation’ was the recurring word. It floated out from the meetings between Daddy and Mr Rafter. The people outside who were agitating for land they had always been denied were looking in over our crumbling walls and seeing our untilled and untended acres. Daddy’s ill health alone was preventing what only a short time before would have been unthinkable: the surrender of Longstead. And then, one night, when the house was locked and asleep, there came a mighty explosion. I felt terror, as if something that had always lain hidden was now enlarged. The absence of a man was piercing as I made my way downstairs. Wind blew through the shattered window of the drawing room, making the curtains billow. I felt as if we had all been violated. And next morning, one of the farm hands came in and fearfully reported that someone had painted a message on the wall by our gates. I went down with him to see. The bold letters seemed to have been scrawled with venom: LANDLORDS OUT!

It seemed futile to say that we were not landlords, that we rented land to no one.

An envelope came addressed to Bella and me: The Misses Bella and Ismay Seston . In it was a postcard from Ronnie Shaw, or, to be precise, a note scrawled by him on a postcard of his father’s: LANGLEY SHAW MFH, SIBRILLE . Ronnie had managed to enlist in a regiment of the British Army in Northern Ireland, it seemed, and was throwing a party in Monument before he left. A hotel had been booked and bedrooms reserved for us. Ronnie seemed to have recovered.

I sat down and wrote a polite refusal, explaining that Bella was in London and that owing to family commitments, I could not accept. Leaving home, even for a night, when my father lay dying and when rocks were being hurled through our windows was out of the question. I sealed the envelope and put it on the hall table for posting in the village later that day. But then an hour went by and I was helping to prepare my father’s lunch when a sudden image transfixed me. It was that of a lithe body suspended in the air. I went out to the hall and sat, trying to come to terms with what I felt. A weakness, even a helplessness. I could not bring myself to call it a craving, but I had to see him again, even if it meant abrogating all the many responsibilities that I had taken on. Feeling reckless and dizzy, I tore up the first letter and wrote another, explaining that Bella was in London, but saying that I would love to come.

Mr Rafter’s son, the one on the council, had a van with an anthracite roof burner: he drove me across the border of Meath into County Kildare on a Friday morning. I had left written instructions as to Daddy’s regime and had made everyone recite back to me what was to happen at the key times: when he needed changing and turning and how his ho water bottle was to be kept hot and wrapped in a towel and what pills he had to take and when. Mother kissed me goodbye without a care in the world, which almost made me change my mind; but by then John Rafter’s van was waiting at the hall door.

‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked, as we drove between fields of cattle.

John Rafter was an almost comical reproduction of his father, and although he was not as neat or natty and always seemed in need of a shave, he had shaken off the obsequiousness that was part of Mr Rafter.

‘It’s a faction, Iz, just a faction,’ he said.

I asked what he meant.

‘People will go to extremes in times of hardship and there’s a lot of hardship around at the minute. It’s just unfortunate that — you’ll excuse me — that there’s no able-bodied man in Longstead.’

‘My brother is fighting a war.’

‘There’s a faction out there that pays no heed to that at all. Forgive the language, but with only two women in your place, the bastards have nothing to fear or lose.’

‘Are we alone in being attacked like this?’

‘Not at all, it’s happening all over,’ John Rafter said, as if reassurance lay in widespread intimidation.

‘Where? I haven’t heard. Are the Penrose’s waking up to messages painted on their property? Are they getting rocks hurled through their windows?’

John looked over at me kindly. ‘That’s a different set up, Iz. In that case, the faction would have too much to lose.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘There’s twenty men employed by the Penroses. Add in their families and you have a hundred people depending on a weekly wage. They have out-farms thirty miles from Grange. They have £100 given to heat the school. At Christmas, every Penrose cottage got a goose, a ham and six bottles of porter. Those people are much better off with the Penroses there than with trying to put them out.’

We had arrived at a tiny railway station and for the second time that morning, I felt an overpowering urge to stay at home, but John was smiling at me.

‘You go on now and stop worrying. I’ll be here at twelve tomorrow to collect you.’

‘Thank you,’ I said and to my own great surprise, and I’m sure to his too, I leant over and kissed his grainy cheek.

Within half an hour I had forgotten Longstead. The train plunged through tawny fields, through cooling stands of trees from which spouts of slate-grey pigeon erupted, by way of luminous lakes, by somnolent villages where ass-carts stood with their load of a single milk churn and youths with hurling sticks paused to wave. We crossed rivers with cattle on their banks and paddocks of sleek, indignant horses, and went by cottages with sleeping black cats on their steps and pigs out the back. I marvelled that the train could take in so much in its journey, that Ireland was not just one country but a collection of so many different places. I saw mountains whose flanks were covered in stands of timber and in whose high pleats the ivory-like flecks of cattle were imbedded. Across the carriage corridor, the masts of ships came into view.

At the station, a jarvey took my bag and I boarded a horse-coach that surely hadn’t seen daylight for over a century but which now, with the Emergency, had been brought back into service. As we set out down the quayside, the hooves of the big Irish draught sang on the cobblestones. The tidal river, the power in its midstream, the way the quite large ships looked at its mercy, and the trawlers, all slapping up and down to the river’s command, excited me unaccountably. I had, I knew, spent every minute since I had left here waiting to come back.

‘The Commercial Hotel, Miss,’ said the jarvey, opening the hatch.

I looked up and saw how the whole town seemed to be in a pile, houses where one expected sky, and seagulls perched on the utmost chimney pots.

The hall of the hotel, floored in terracotta tiles, was dim. I went to a desk for my key and heard, from an inner bar, the swelling sound of drinking men. Ronnie had written to say that he would call in at three and take me out to see the sea at Sibrille. My bedroom overlooked the river and I sat for an hour, absorbing the contrast with what I was used to, the port activity and throngs of people in place of stillness; but after waiting another half an hour for Ronnie, I went out to explore.