Colm Tóibín - The Blackwater Lightship

She remembered hearing from Declan how the old house had been sold. Declan had mentioned this casually, as though he were telling her that their mother had changed her car. He was surprised at how upset Helen had become, and admitted that although he had known it for some time he did not think it was important enough to tell her. When had the sale happened, she had asked him, and he told her that their mother had moved to Wexford four or five months before. And who had bought the house? Declan told her that he had not the slightest idea. And what had happened to the furniture, the ornaments, the pictures, the photographs? Declan laughed at her concern about these and said he didn't know.

'There were things belonging to me in that house,' Helen said to him.

'What things? Don't be so stupid!'

'Things in my room. Books, photographs, things that mattered to me.'

'She cleared out your room years ago.'

'She had no right to do that.'

The house was gone now. In her mind, she went through the rooms again, how each door closed – the door to her parents' room almost noiseless, the door to Declan's room more stubborn, impossible to open or close without alerting the whole house \a151 or the light switches – the one outside the bathroom which Declan when he was tall enough loved turning off while someone was inside, the light switch inside her bedroom door, firm and hard, to be turned on and off decisively, unlike the light switch in her parents' room, which could be switched on and off with a little flick.

She pictured the house empty and ghostly, like a ship under water, as though it had been left as it was on the last day she saw it. The box of Mass cards and sympathy cards for her father under her parents' bed, and another box full of old photographs. The opening to the attic covered by a square of wood which could be shifted sideways on a windy night.

Someone else lived there now. This was what happened to houses, Declan told her. Get over it, he said in a mock American accent.

In the days after she heard about it, however, nothing about the sale of the house seemed to her normal or inevitable. In the first year of their relationship, she had made an agreement with Hugh that she would tell him when she was upset or worried, that she would not keep things bottled up, as was her habit, withholding something important from him so that he would find out only months later the cause of a period of silence and blackness. But she could not tell him about the house and her feeling on hearing the news of the sale because she could not think why she should mind so much.

She was angry with her mother, having tried to feel nothing about her for years, and having believed that her mother would never be able to provoke her again. She remained for days in a silent rage. Hugh watched her pretending it was nothing until she realised that she would have to tell him what it was. He was puzzled by the source of the anger, and he wondered if it was not about something else.

He told her that she would have to resolve it by talking about it; he loved the language of emollience and reconciliation. They went to bed early and she talked for hours while he held her and listened. He tried to understand, but the conflicts were too sharp and too deeply embedded for him to fathom. She felt she needed to revisit the rooms of the old house, even in her imagination, knowing that something had ended. She needed, she thought, to let it end, to ease it out of herself. These rooms no longer were hers; instead, now, the rooms of the house she shared with Hugh and the boys belonged to her.

It was a few days later as she was driving home from school that a thought struck her which caused her to pull in and sit in the car and go back over everything again. It was this: she could not put the house and its sale out of her mind because she believed that she would some day go back there, that it would be her refuge, and that her mother, despite everything, would be there for her and would take her in and shelter her and protect her. She had never entertained this thought before; now, she knew that it was irrational and groundless, but nonetheless, as she sat in the car, she knew that it was real and it explained everything.

Somewhere in the part of her where fears lay unexplored and conflicts unresolved, there was a belief that the life she had made with Hugh would fail her; not precisely that he would leave her, but more exactly that she would some day or night appear at her mother's door asking to be taken in and forgiven and her mother would tell her that her room was always there for her, and that she could stay as long as she liked. The boys did not exist in this scenario, nor the possibility that she could ever take refuge in her mother's new house, and she realised that it was a fantasy, and something that she must not think about. However, it overcame her like a sudden nausea, and she knew that she could not tell Hugh about it, it would seem too dark and disloyal to him, it would frighten him even more than it frightened her.

She had it in the open now – she was sure she was right about it \a151 and she would have to combat it quietly herself, tell herself over and over that she would never need to appear at her mother's door like this, or sleep, comforted by her mother, in her old room. The house was gone, she thought. I have a new house. But the dark thoughts about the old house continued to trouble her.

And it was only now that it struck her that Declan had just the previous evening enacted the fantasy that she had feared so much. He had come back asking for comfort and forgiveness, as she had felt she would, and they had been ready for him, as though they too had always been alert to their side of the bargain. She was frightened by the symmetry in this, but she did not know what it meant.

Her grandmother came in with a cup of tea and put it on the locker beside her bed.

'Declan's just up,' she said. 'He's in the bathroom. Lily went into Wexford at the crack of dawn, she said she'd be back sometime this morning.'

As soon as Declan had finished in the bathroom, Helen got up and had a shower and dressed herself. The day was overcast and windy. When she went into the kitchen, Declan and her grandmother were there, Declan sitting beside the Aga looking frail and uneasy.

'It's a terrible day,' he said. 'Granny says it might clear up, but it's a terrible day.'

She realised that he was trapped here now, that he had dreamed about this house and the cliff and the strand, but the dreams had not included the possibility of an ordinary morning, with a grey sky and a whistling wind, had not included his trying to talk to his grandmother as she washed up. Her first urge was to think of an excuse to go into the village, offering perhaps to take Declan with her, and to stay there for as long as she could. Her grandmother, she presumed, was as uncomfortable as they were, her routine destroyed by these two half-strange interlopers.

'Do you go into Wexford much, Granny?' Helen asked as her grandmother sat down at the kitchen table.

'Oh, I go in once a week,' she said and sipped her tea.

'How do you get in?' Helen asked.

'This only started last year when I sold the sites,' her grandmother said, moving over to sit at the kitchen table. 'I decided that I would go to Wexford every Wednesday. So I asked around and I discovered that Ted Kinsella in Blackwater ran a sort of hackney service. So I arranged with him that he would drive me into Wexford on a Wednesday morning and collect me outside Petit's supermarket at four o'clock. And I paid him very well for this, as you can imagine. And it was lovely.' Her grandmother smiled and continued. She appeared to relish this opportunity to talk. 'I had the day to myself. I would buy a paper and a magazine and sit in White's or the Talbot and have tea and then I'd wander through the town and look at the shops, and I tried out every place for lunch in the whole town. You'd have to go early or late, or else you'd get into a crush with all the office people. And, of course, I'd avoid your mother.' She laughed, almost maliciously. 'And then I'd go to the supermarket and I'd do the whole week's shopping. I didn't know myself. But it couldn't last, of course. Didn't Ted Kinsella let it be known around that he was driving into Wexford twice of a Wednesday, and didn't he start bringing in all sorts of people with him? Oh, they'd want to know all your business, and they'd look up in your face as they'd ask you were you going to sell any more sites. And then one day \a151 this was the week before Christmas – Ted arrived and told me, if you don't mind, that he had to collect another passenger at five and would I like to wait in the car or would I like to wait somewhere else. And he was already ten minutes late! Oh, I cleaned his clock for him now. I was raging. And I was paying him the same as I was paying him when I drove in on my own. So when I got home I sent him a note with Tom Wallace the postman saying that I wouldn't be going into Wexford any more. I gave no reason. Sure he knew the reason.' She paused and pursed her lips as though she was indignant once again.