Peter Cunningham - The Sea and the Silence

‘Mrs Shaw?’

‘I’m Mrs Shaw.’

‘Telephone call, madam.’

I followed him out and down a corridor to a line of little wooden cabins with glass doors. Behind a counter, women in headsets worked tangled, eel-like lines of telephone cables.

‘Hello?’ I said, closing the door to one cabin.

‘Iz?’

‘Who is it?’

‘This is Rosa. Hector told me where you were staying, but…’

‘Hello?’

‘… I don’t want you to be alarmed because I’m sure there’s nothing too badly wrong, but Hector’s got a knock on his head.’

I saw through the glass the women’s speeding hands, arranging, re-arranging.

‘Oh, God. Is he..?’

‘Jack’s brought him to the hospital, they’re keeping him overnight, simply a precaution, I’m sure. We’ve tried to send word to Ronnie.’

There was no telephone in Sibrille.

‘He’s probably out showing land,’ I said. ‘Oh my God. Is he conscious?’

‘He…’ Her voice faded, re-surged. ‘…his eyes.’

‘I’m sorry, I can’t hear! Is Hector conscious?’

The phone seemed dead. I shook it, crazily.

‘Iz? Are you there?’

‘His eyes? What about his eyes?’

‘…fell off Kevin’s pony. You mustn’t be alarmed, my husband…. one of you… ‘

All I could think of was fishermen and eels. ‘But is he conscious?’

‘He was…’

She went into the far distance again. I kicked open the door.

‘She’s gone!’ I cried and the telephone women turned and stared at me.

‘…the doctor said. Iz?’

I was suffocating so much that I could hardly hold the telephone, I said, ‘I’m coming home.’

The last train to Monument had left. Although I wanted to hire a taxi, Mr Jennings would hear none of it. I was too shocked to argue. Dick Coad saw us off, the unfixed pupils of his eyes at large. He had papers to file next morning in the Four Courts, he said, otherwise he too, in the circumstances, would have returned to Monument. He had spent a fruitless fifteen minutes trying to get through to the hospital.

‘I shall say a decade of the rosary,’ he said and I saw my own face reflected in the car’s window, hand to my throat.

‘She’ll have us there in under four hours,’ Mr Jennings said as we met the flat, open countryside. ‘She’s made for a trip like this.’

From the moment he had been born, it had been my greatest dread. Now it was as if I had long foreseen this day, as if my terror, and the fact that I could move my limbs only with difficulty and the clutch in my breast had all been rehearsed.

We stopped for refreshments in a midlands town. Mr Jennings had spoken almost non-stop since our departure, not in an intrusive way, but in a low drone as if a wireless were turned on in another room. His wife was from Belfast, her father had been a minister, there was murder when she married Mr Jennings, a Catholic. They went to India in 1929. He asked the girl behind the till for a receipt for the pot of tea and we resumed our journey.

‘You take life as it comes,’ he said, a repeated theme. ‘You treat it decent and life obliges you, as a rule.’

It was still light as we came in by Deilt. I craved Ronnie. He would be at the hospital, by Hector’s bed, and I would have someone into whose arms I could fall. The hospital, built on the Deilt road, was almost the first building in Monument one came to from the Dublin direction. We swept in around a circular flowerbed to the front doors and, as I got out, I smelt new-mown grass, the first cut of that year. The porter saw me and came out from his desk. My legs were going.

‘Mrs Shaw.’

I had no idea how he knew me, discovered days later that he was from Sibrille.

‘Is my husband here?’

‘No, Ma’m, but the little fellow is fine,’ he said.

‘Oh, thank God!’

He was supporting my elbow as we proceeded down a corridor of blinding lights.

‘Gave us all a fright. Mrs Santry herself came in with him, there was a sight of blood, but it just goes to show, the more blood the better is often the way,’ the porter said.

I could not work it out. ‘Has my husband been in?’

‘No ma’m, although we sent a message to the post office in Sibrille,’ the porter said. ‘We didn’t want to send a telegram — think of the fright the poor man would get. Now, here we are.’

I went into the room and saw Hector in an enormous bed, his head bandaged, his thumb in his mouth, asleep.

‘Hector.’

I held him for my life. He opened his eyes and smiled.

‘He can see me!’ I cried.

‘There, now.’ A nurse wearing a silver badge was beside me.

‘He’s a little rascal, there’s no doubt. Aren’t you a rascal, Master Shaw?’

‘I was riding Kevin’s pony,’ Hector whispered and went back to sleep.

‘He’s bound to be exhausted, and so are you, Mrs Shaw,’ the nurse said. ‘We heard from Mrs Santry that you were in Dublin.’

‘Oh my God!’ I cried. ‘I never thanked Mr Jennings.’

No breath of wind disturbed the surface of the sea. It seemed bizarre that in the sixteen hours since I had left, so much had taken place, yet that Ronnie was still unaware. I was glad for him. When I told him, he would, despite how late it was, want to drive into Monument to see Hector, but none of the agony of my journey would attend his.

The headlamps of the hackney swept the still water as we came down the causeway. No life was evident in the windows of either the lighthouse or Langley’s. I felt emptied to a place of peace and exhaustion, as if I had walked twenty miles. So grateful, too, for all the many kindness I had been shown. To have been anxious about a house — a mere house, whatever its provenance — seemed profane in the face of what had nearly been. I promised myself to never again be concerned about possessions. We had something rare and wonderful, Ronnie, Hector and I.

The driver pulled up beside Ronnie’s car and brought my suitcase up the steps to the door. I stood and watched as he drove up into the village and then back into the mass of the land, his lights fading. Voices drifted down to me, people leaving the pub in Sibrille, their cheery ‘goodnights’, or the growl of a tractor, the transport for many. I often stood out here like this, alone, on the edge, the voices and sounds of the village a tenuous connection, yet a connection all the same to something essential that we were not quite part of.

I brought in my suitcase, closed the door. Coals glowed in the range. I heard movement upstairs. Ronnie must have been tired and had gone to bed early. I put the light on, filled the kettle to make tea for us, for I knew he would get a shock when he heard the news.

‘Ronnie!’ A voice in the kitchen could be heard clearly overhead. ‘It’s me, darling!’

Then I saw a page of notepaper lying on the table beside its torn envelope. I saw the stamp of Sibrille’s post office and that day’s date.

Dear Captain Shaw,

Your son has been in a riding accident. Please contact the hospital in Monument.

I stood there, trying to work it out: how could Ronnie have read this note and not gone into Monument? His car was parked outside. How could he be in bed knowing Hector was in hospital? And then, as if volts were passing through my head, I heard another voice in our bedroom.

Shouting, I ran upstairs. As I came to our bedroom door, a low-sized, ghost-like figure clutching up a bed sheet went to pass me. I screamed. I tore the sheet away and stared at the defiant, pug-like face. I screamed and screamed as Ronnie pushed by me with armfuls of their clothes and went down the stairs. The smell of her in my bedroom. I could hear them going out the door. I flung open the windows and dragged over the bedding and, screaming, pitched everything into the sea. I could hear the car leaving. It was not just that I had caught him, but that he had elected to fornicate here rather than drive into Monument and be with Hector. Enraged, I hurled Ronnie’s shirts, shoes, ties, hunting clothes and boots into the Atlantic. I screamed. I threw out his brushes and silver dressing-table accoutrements, his entire drawers of socks and handkerchiefs and underwear. I threw every trace of him into the sea. Were it not for the splinter of reason that told me that my son needed me, I would have thrown myself.