Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘It’s short for Ismay,’ I said.

‘Ah,’ he said as if a long-standing question had been resolved.

Despite his age, his hairline had already begun to recede. I would not have been surprised to learn that I was the first client he had been let loose on. We chatted about Peppy’s death and about the Shaws.

‘The Shaws came to Ardnish in either 1673 or ’74, you know,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘John Shaw, an infantryman. He’d been a cooper in Devon and had, it would appear, been forced to enlist.’

We were steaming through the foothills of the Deilt Mountains, past a wooded area known as Glane. Dick’s uncoordinated eyes roved. His father had given him an office beside his own above the shop in Mead Street where his mother and sister sold stationery.

‘Then there is a gap until 1687. John Shaw Esquire takes a lease of a thousand acres on the Ardnish peninsula — “for so long as he wisheth” — from the Earl of Ardnish and Eillne — a title now long extinct — at a rent of £25 per annum, quite a lot of money in those days.’

Smoke from the cigarette streamed into Dick’s wild, left eye as we forged through a field of white cattle.

‘That’s how it all began,’ he said, his cigarette moving with each word, ‘that’s the Shaw history.’

‘You take history very seriously, Dick.’

Dick clapped his chest and chuckled. ‘Too seriously for my own good, my mother says, always asking why I spend my time worming through parchments. I have this sense of history, ever since I first read the account of the Peloponnesian War.’

The door of the carriage slid open and a steward brought in trays with tea and toast.

‘The invention of history as a recorded subject,’ he continued and flamed another cigarette. ‘We’re all the heirs of Thucydides, we historians, you know. The thing to remember is that at the beginning — and I’m talking about the very beginning, which is to say, let me be accurate, 431 B.C. — Pericles had no intention of offering battle to the Spartans. He knew he had the superior navy, so it was all down to a waiting game. Close the net at sea, block the Gulf of Corinth, Bob’s your uncle. I’m boring you.’

‘On the contrary. Please.’

‘Then came the plague.’ Dick’s young face became grim. ‘Is there any fairness in nature?’

‘Very little,’ I said, ‘yet in the end, nature is all we are left to rely on.’

‘I rest my case,’ Dick said. ‘One third of all the troops died, you know, including Pericles himself. What might have happened had he lived, led on? In that aberration of nature lay the fatal undermining of the Athenian state, although it would take another twenty-seven years to come about. What statesman could have bargained for that? As he lay dying, could Pericles possibly have imagined that in a few short years, the Persians would be funding the Spartan war effort? I mean, even Hippocrates himself could not match Pericles for vision. He was too slow, Hippocrates!’

‘I see.’

‘Thirty-five thousand Athenians killed at Syracuse alone!’ Dick’s eyes rolled in their separate conventions. ‘Are you quite sure you want to sell this property?’

I stared at him. ‘I beg your pardon?’

‘It’s just that, as my father explained, the house was Mrs Shaw’s — that is, I should say, the late Mrs Shaw’s — and thus quite separate to the collective Shaw properties, if you understand me, which may well have been why her late father, God rest him, employed my father and not Beagles to represent her, although one can never speak for the dead. And then, in her will — she was a lady for whom my father had the utmost regard — the late Mrs Shaw bequeathed the same property to your goodself alone. And thus I make so bold as to wonder, if you permit, whether this decision of yours to sell is, shall I say, made in the same spirit of being separate from the collective in which it was from the outset designated and subsequently bequeathed.’

Dismay rolled over me in a way for which I had not been prepared.

‘Dick,’ I said, ‘it has been decided.’

In Dublin, we travelled by taxi from the station to Ballsbridge, via the Shelbourne Hotel, where I was booked in. In Ballsbridge, the surveyor was waiting in his car outside the house. My house. I had never seen it before and when I got out felt a great surge of possession and, simultaneously, of loss. It was much bigger than I had imagined, one half of a solid, redbrick duo, with steep granite steps to the front door and graceful bay windows on two floors. Behind iron railings that marked the boundary of the property with the road lay a well-planted front garden. This was my house. Having scarcely seen it, I was now about to sell it.

As we made our way in along the gravel path, the surveyor, whose name was Mr Jennings, leapt ahead opening doors and then generally fretting over whether or not I might like to sit down, as if the journey thus far had exhausted me. I let him and Dick off with their maps and tapes and wandered through the house, thinking of Peppy.

The undersecretary and his family were abroad and the house was in the charge of an elderly but active woman who made me a cup of tea and spoke in warm terms about the old days. She remembered Peppy well, to my surprise, because I had not thought that Peppy had had much connection with the house beyond it being an investment.

‘She used to come up to it a lot when she took it over first,’ the woman said. ‘After the war — the war here, I mean. Whenever she’d come up to Dublin I could tell from her that there’d been trouble.’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘Oh, the usual kind,’ the woman replied. ‘She’d say to me, “Mrs Bailey, I hate men”. And even though with my poor husband dead I didn’t have a man to love, let alone hate, I knew what she meant, God love her and be merciful to her.’

The house had been Peppy’s refuge from Sibrille, her own house, away from Langley’s and his affairs. I thought of her sitting here, where I now sat, looking out on the garden, day by day recovering her self esteem.

‘Iz?’

Dick Coad’s comical eyes floated around the door.

‘Yes?’

‘Mr Jennings wondered would you do him the honour of allowing him to bring you to afternoon tea in the Shelbourne?’ Dick asked.

Mr Jenning’s car crept along with great discretion.

‘You can hear a watch tick, her engine is that quiet,’ he told me and took out his pocket watch, which I then had to pretend I could hear.

‘She’s a smashing motor altogether,’ Dick remarked from the back. ‘Grand bit of walnut.’

‘A whole tree for every two cars, they say,’ said Mr Jennings happily as we came to Stephen’s Green.

‘You got everything you need, Mr Jennings?’ I enquired.

‘Oh, yes. Lovely house, Mrs Shaw. Great scope to it,’ the surveyor said.

‘Would have stood on the edge of countryside originally,’ Dick said.

‘No doubt,’ said Mr Jennings, making way for a tram. ‘They don’t build them like that any more.’

Swan-tailed waiters served from silver teapots into Wedgwood in the Shelbourne’s heavily draped greenroom. Pages wandered in and out singing messages in falsetto as Mr Jennings told us about his eldest daughter, married to a senior policeman in Nottingham, and how he, Mr Jennings, with Mrs Jennings, had been introduced to the Lord Mayor, and how they had travelled, courtesy of the Lord Mayor, in his Bentley all the way to the boat in Liverpool.

‘Nottingham,’ said Dick, warming up, ‘what did you think of the cathedral?’

‘We didn’t get Mass in Nottingham,’ said Mr Jennings. ‘Some more tea, Mrs Shaw?’

I sat forward. ‘Isn’t that my name?’

I beckoned the page.