Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘Just means they were using the opportunity to sneak a look at their new property,’ said Bella dryly.

‘What developments has Rafter in mind?’ Harry enquired.

Bella lifted her chin. ‘Longstead is lost unless Iz marries Norman Penrose.’

They turned as one to me, but I had made my mind up and was ready for them. I just smiled.

‘The Penroses can do no wrong in these people’s eyes,’ Bella said. ‘If Iz marries Norman, then Longstead will not be touched. The Land Commission will back off. Mr Rafter says he can as good as guarantee that that is what will happen.’

They all looked to me again.

‘Do you want to marry Norman, Iz?’ asked Lolo.

‘I’ll marry him,’ I said.

Harry’s breath came out in a long, relieved hiss. ‘Well, were it not for the occasion, I’d suggest we drink champagne,’ he grinned.

‘Thank God. I’ll tell Rafter,’ Bella said.

They came and kissed me in turn. Bella and I left the bedroom last.

‘By the way, on the matter of you know who…’ she began.

‘Please.’

‘Thank God Nick made inquiries. It seems he is on a list of the most wanted men in Ireland,’ she said.

‘I don’t wish to discuss it.’

‘He’s got a price on his head, you know.’

‘ I don’t wish to discuss it! ’ I screamed and left her there, her front jutting out like an anthill.

My engagement to Norman did not have the effect of stopping the land agitation completely. Some local people who owed nothing to the Penroses felt that a great prize was being snatched from them and continued to lobby and to hold meetings and to demand action from their local representatives.

Although the outcome of the war was no longer in doubt, I felt as if I were in my own war where survival depended on hard decisions and compromises. I saw Norman at least every Sunday, either when Mother and I went for luncheon to Mount Penrose, or when Norman and his father came to us. I wore an engagement ring that had been his mother’s and we went for walks, during which he spoke in steady tones about his ambitions and plans for Longstead. He had placed a notice announcing our engagement in the national newspapers. He had planned an engagement party, the first party in Mount Penrose in fifty years, he said. Although we had not yet been intimate, Norman seemed to already regard me as his wife.

I spent most of February clearing the detritus of winter from the shrubberies and digging beds in preparation for spring vegetables. I worked often without pause for four or five hours, as if afraid that stopping would give me time to think. I organised the annual spring clean of Longstead, the most thorough in memory, and helped carry out carpets and rugs on to the gravel and went back in to inspect, with dismay, the gaping holes in our floors where rot had thrived uninterrupted for fifty years. Norman sent over a carpenter and within two weeks new timbers had been laid and varnished.

‘These windows are all beyond repair,’ Norman said. ‘We’ll have to replace them.’

I did not protest. It seemed easier just to let him get on with it.

The party was held in Mount Penrose on a Saturday in late February, when gales ripped the length of Ireland. Bella and Nick arrived home, Bella now hugely pregnant and exhausted from a nine-hour sea crossing. They were well suited, Nick and Bella, she with her imperious demeanour and he with the kind of icy authority that sits on men who see their wishes enacted as laws. Mother’s stated intentions about her repatriation to Yorkshire were ignored by Bella, who advised that they were nothing more but the onset of dotage.

On the evening of the party, I put on a dress that had been made for me in Dublin and would eventually be paid for out of Daddy’s meagre estate. It was silk crepe, the colour of sunset, and fell from beneath a bow at the waist in tiers. The neck was square cut and the top half broken only by a single row of buttons. Nick drew in his breath when I came downstairs.

‘You look absolutely ravishing,’ he said and kissed my cheek.

We left Mother playing whist with Mrs Rainbow and set out in John Rafter’s van for Grange. As gusts of wind struck the little vehicle and tried to fling it off the road, I made lists in my head of the things I would prefer to be doing rather than going to my engagement party. Halfway to Grange, I lost count and abandoned the exercise.

Mount Penrose was a square, severe house and had been built in the mid-nineteenth century when the fashion must have been for oak: staircases, doors, window reveals, floors, fireplaces and skirting boards all brooded the provenance of dark forests. I thought of our own home, ramshackle in comparison, yet in its own way comfortable. The Penroses had installed an orchestra and although the country was still on war rations, one hundred people would eat roast beef and drink champagne. Norman met me at the door and I took his arm and we went in. A man with a black moustache came towards us, limping.

‘I now know I was wrong,’ he said. ‘You are not just the most beautiful woman in Meath, but in Ireland.’

‘Ronnie!’ I laughed and he hugged me. ‘I thought you were somewhere in France!’

‘Got in the way of a Gerry bullet, I’m afraid,’ Ronnie said, ‘but they didn’t realise they were dealing with a Monumentals man.’

He grinned and the gap between his front teeth appeared and made me laugh out loud. Perhaps it was the moustache, but he seemed older and in the process more dignified. I wanted to ask what had become of Frank, but Bella and Nick were hovering. Then I saw Ronnie’s cufflinks in the shape of rugby balls and the thought of the evening on which he had been presented with them made me plunge.

Except for the beginning of war, nothing is headier than the prospect of its ending: people spoke of curtailments being suspended in a month, of travel restrictions being abolished and of sons coming home. As the band struck up, Stanley Penrose swung me around the floor of his hall, his white whiskers tickling my chin, and confidently predicted that I would give him at least four grandchildren. He pressed me on the date for the wedding, but when I was evasive showed a flash of the steel with which he had made his fortune.

‘You’re not going to go on playing the monkey with the poor lad, are ye now?’ he asked.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You know what I mean, Miss.’

I excused myself and went and locked myself into the Penrose’s toilet. I saw myself in the gilt-framed mirror, my lovely dress and my anxious face. I will do this, I told myself, and went back out.

I danced with twenty men and each one vied with his predecessor to assure me of my destined happiness. I was terrified: of Stanley Penrose, of these people, this house. I looked around for Ronnie, but each time I saw him, I was grabbed anew and steered for the music.

Norman and I sat down with Bella and Nick for supper. My future husband, although he would never entirely shed his solemn demeanour, even on an evening such as this, nonetheless was lighter than I had ever seen him. I tried to let go and to imagine the fine life that awaited me here, the wealth and the certainty. Norman’s father called the party to order and proposed our toast, which involved him making a long and serious speech about land agitation, during which everyone shouted Hear! Hear! and nodded their heads grimly as their host spoke of the shortcomings of the government, the injustice of the law and the brink of anarchy on which he assured us we were all poised. Norman replied briefly and then everyone stood up and applauded me. Led by Norman to the centre of the floor, we danced for them in the house of which I would soon be mistress and all I could think of was the dance in the hotel in Monument.