Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

The day turned wet. I sat reading in the lantern bay and saw Stonely, ponderous, bare headed and without a coat, walk slowly out the causeway. I thought about the blank look on Ronnie’s face as he had ridden up the village hill. We had little money and this worried him, I knew. He received a tiny pension from the army for his war wound and part of the pittance that came from the letting of the land around the lighthouse; anything else was from the commissions he received for the very occasional sale of land or from the sale of a young horse that he had purchased and made into a hunter. As I sat, I heard hooves, that of a horse flat out.

My first thought was that a cliff fox, interrupted during an inland foray, was now being hunted to its earth near the sea; then I saw Peppy’s horse, riderless, its single leather and iron bouncing, its double reins loose, come crashing down the steep road from the village and bolt straight out along the causeway. It was back in the yard when I reached it, creamy with sweat, feeding from a hay net. I caught its bridle and walked it to a stable, then ran out on to the causeway and listened, but could hear nothing except the tide. Hurrying back in again, I shouted to Delaney to keep an eye on Hector, then I found the keys to Ronnie’s car and, praying it had petrol, started it up and headed for the village. If you hunted, you fell, and Peppy had hunted all her life. Sibrille was deserted. I took the Monument road, the rain slanting from the north. The horse would not have bolted for more than fifteen minutes, I imagined, trying to work out how that translated into the distance from Sibrille at which it had unseated Peppy. After another few hundred yards I saw, cantering up the grass verge towards me, Ronnie and the huntsman, their horses’ ears flat. Ronnie, ashen, slid from his horse, grabbed open the car door and sat in, speechless. He steamed. He could only point for me to drive the way he had come.

‘Is she… all right?’ I asked.

Ronnie’s mouth hung open and his breaths came rasping. With a frantic waving of his hands, he motioned me on. I felt dread, an old feeling.

‘What has happened?’ I cried, driving.

Ronnie shook his head, closed his eyes. A man standing by the roadside, wet hair plastered down his face, waved his arms for me to drive up a boreen. I turned, but the car’s wheels skidded in muck and we slewed sideways. Ronnie was out, at the bonnet, with the man from the roadside who had run up the lane. The reverse gear roared and they pushed. The car leapt back.

‘Please let me drive.’

I scrambled around to get in the other door as Ronnie took my place. He reversed back out to the centre of the metal road, threw the lever into second gear and came back up the lane at speed. We careened from one limit to the other, briars scraping on both sides, the underbody grating rocks. I could see nothing for mud. Ronnie was weeping.

‘Is she all right?’

‘The priest is with her.’

‘What happened?’

‘Fucking horse dived under a tree.’

Ronnie’s shoulders were heaving in distress. We began to meet horses at the head of the lane. Ronnie jumped out. I saw the riders stare at him. I pushed through and the lane opened out into a bleak, boulder-strewn field. Men stood holding clutches of horses. Fifty yards in and to one side, next to a ditch on which grew hawthorn scraws and a twisted ash, I saw a huddle, people holding an overcoat to make a canopy. Her grey skirt was spread out around her like a blanket. Langley stood to one side, his mouth spiked in the grin of his usual insouciance. It was to him I rushed, almost crying with relief, for surely Langley’s unconcern meant that nothing beyond easy repair could have happened in this damp place.

‘Langley…’

He turned to me, his eyes empty, his smile fixed. ‘What a frightful day,’ he said.

‘Is Peppy… is she all right?’

‘Gone for the high-jump, I’m afraid,’ he said.

I stared at him. I became aware of Father O’Dea beside me.

‘Mrs Shaw,’ he said, ‘poor Mrs Shaw is dead.’

I liked the winters best in Sibrille, the really blowy months when even at low tide the sea engulfed the causeway and cut us off. At such times, the nearby village seemed like an act of folly, its houses like barnacles on the cliffs. Local people told me that after a whole winter of wind-driven sand and salt water, their eyebrows grew into crusts.

I missed Peppy. I had come to value the sight of her exercising a horse or walking down the causeway with a clump of birds in one hand, a gun in the other, or on a summer’s evening on an incoming tide, standing on an utmost rock, casting for sea bass. She had fashioned her own world from Sibrille because she had had to. It was fitting, I thought, that she had died on her own terms. She would have felt nothing, the doctor said afterwards. Death had been instantaneous.

Peppy’s estate was administered by her own solicitor, the Mr Coad who hunted. He had been Peppy’s legal advisor since she first came to Ireland and had helped her keep her finances quite separate from her husband’s. Her income, which now went to Langley and Ronnie, came from canny investments made by her English north-country father. But mine was the greatest surprise: Peppy left me her house in Dublin’s Ballsbridge, which was rented, by long habit, to the undersecretaries of embassies.

Peppy’s money set Ronnie off on a spree. He put in central heating, something he’d seen in Dublin, and had the lighthouse painted inside and out. Without asking me, he brought in an Englishwoman who lived near Monument, a Mrs De Vere, and asked her to make loose covers for us as she had for the Santrys.

‘I’d prefer you asked me before you arranged these things,’ I said.

Ronnie looked at me, surprised. ‘It’s a business thing. I bought the De Veres their farm.’

I’d come in with Hector the day before and found a small, pug-faced woman with pins in her mouth, stretched like a rubber band across our bedroom window.

‘It’s my house, Ronnie.’

‘I only wanted to surprise you.’

‘She’s even chosen the curtain material.’

‘My dear, please.’ Ronnie could become so like Langley. ‘She’s apparently quite famous for curtains. I mean, you’ve seen Main.’

‘I’m sure Rosa Santry did not give Mrs De Vere carte blanche,’ I said. ‘I want to be consulted.’

Ronnie sighed. ‘As you wish.’

Suddenly, we had a new Austin car, and, for the first time, a horse trailer to go behind it. And then, one night, on the Deilt side of Monument, Ronnie almost died.

He’d been driving too fast. The car had skidded off the road, then somersaulted down a ravine where, crushed and twisted, it had lain for half the night before being found. Ronnie spent six weeks in Dublin’s Mater Hospital, the first two of them fighting for his life. A London neurosurgeon had flown in and operated on his head. His mouth was rebuilt. They doubted if he would ever walk again.

For days, I sat beside his hospital bed, looking at the tubes running from the head and arms, the leaping chest. During those days, both holding Ronnie’s hand and in the chapel to the hospital, I prayed for his sparing so that my son could have a father and me a husband.

He went to a nursing home after the Mater and came home, a supporting plate in his mouth, ten weeks to the day of the crash. He was so thin that one could almost see through him. Three times a week, he needed to be driven into Monument for physiotherapy.

‘I shall recover, you know,’ he said as we approached the new houses on the fringe of town. He was licking at the stiff, plastic support that held up the near side of his mouth. He said, ‘They say I just need time.’