Colm Tóibín - The Blackwater Lightship

It was after nine when Helen woke to the sound of shouting and laughing. She listened and heard the revving of a car and then some more voices. She heard her mother coming down the stairs and shouting something. She wondered if the cats had returned, or if morning light had unveiled them on the roof of one of the outhouses. A car revved again, as though someone were having trouble starting the engine.

She looked into Declan's room when she got up, but his bed was empty. From the dining-room window she could see what was happening in front of the house. Her grandmother was trying to drive Larry's car; Larry was giving her lessons in the front seat. Her grandmother would start the car, rev the engine, get into gear and move forward in a sudden jerk, and then the engine would cut out.

Declan and Paul were sitting in the morning sunlight watching this, laughing and applauding. Lily was at the front door, where Helen joined her.

'She'll crash the car and then she'll blame someone else,' Lily said.

'She can't go far,' Helen said.

This time Mrs Devereux had edged the car slowly towards the gate before it cut out. She opened the window and shouted, 'Lily, Paul, Helen, put your cars out in the lane. I don't have room enough here.'

'We're afraid to move. You'll kill us all,' Lily said.

'Helen, hurry up now!' her grandmother said.

Mrs Devereux listened carefully as Larry explained the gears to her once more. Helen turned Declan's car under her grandmother's impatient gaze. Lily followed her, as did Paul.

'Helen, my flat shoes!' her grandmother shouted as she made her way back to the house. 'They're in the hall.'

She found a pair of flat shoes in the hall and brought them out. Her grandmother had already taken her other shoes off, which she handed imperiously to Helen, immediately going back to Larry to discuss a point about the gearstick.

'Come on, Granny!' Declan shouted. His thin legs were folded around each other.

Mrs Devereux started the car again as they all "watched. She changed the gear and then took her foot off the brake. She let the car forward until it began to shake. She shouted at Larry, 'What'll I do now?'

'Indicate, Granny, indicate,' Declan shouted.

The car stopped. She pursed her lips and looked ahead. Then she opened the door of the car and turned towards her audience. 'Go inside, all of you! I can't learn if you're all going to be watching me and jeering me. No one can learn like that.'

'She's serious about learning,' Helen said. 'I thought it was a joke.'

'Since she got the money for the sites, she's gone cracked,' Lily said. 'Cracked! And wait until the winter comes and she gets depressed and she won't speak to anybody and Father O'Brien will ring me up like he did last year to say that she's been seen walking into Black-water with a string bag for the second time in the same day, and she won't say a word to anyone she meets.'

'Are you serious?' Helen asked.

'Cracked,' Lily said again. 'And she'd a sister Statia, you'd be too young to remember her. She sent me into her in Bree one Christmas. I had an awful time. She was cracked as well. All that family were cracked. So don't start blaming me now for leaving her on her own out here, there's nothing I can do about it.'

'I'm not blaming you,' Helen said.

'What was that yesterday then?' her mother asked.

Declan had gone back to bed. Paul, Lily and Helen had breakfast together while Larry and Mrs Devereux continued their driving lesson.

'I told Declan', Paul said, 'that he should go back to St James's today, but he says that if it remains fine as it is now, he'll stay. Louise is worried about his stomach: there are various things it could be and they would require treatment, but only after a good deal of testing.'

'Could they do the testing today?' Lily asked politely.

'No, but they could start very early in the morning. Louise doesn't want to mask the symptoms any more, so she won't treat him until she knows what it is.'

'You mean treat him with drugs?' Lily asked.

'Right,' Paul said.

Paul and Lily looked at one another across the table and nodded gravely. Helen made more tea for them as they continued talking. After a while, Larry and Mrs Devereux came into the kitchen.

'It's that first gear has me flummoxed,' Mrs Devereux said.

'And second and third too, I wouldn't be surprised,' Lily said.

'No, Mrs Breen, she has great potential,' Larry said. 'My father taught my mother to drive only last year.'

'You'll have to get a provisional licence,' Helen said.

'Oh, sure that's no problem, Helen,' her grandmother said. 'Didn't I tell you what Kitty Walsh from The Ballagh did last year, and she's so blind she can't see in front of her nose, and that's God's truth. Didn't she go into the eye man the day before her appointment, and she just said she was looking at spectacle frames \a151 her sister Winnie told me this \a151 and didn't she look closely at the letters when the door was open, you know, the letters you have to read. She wrote them down and went home and learned them off. So by the next day the eye man complimented her on her sight when she could hardly see the colour of the money she was paying him with. And she driving a Mazda mad all over the country now. Get into the ditch if you see her coming. A red Mazda.'

'Someone should report her,' Lily said.

'It was Winnie told me, and she thought it was a terrible thing. But there was never any talking to Kitty. Their mother was an awful oul' rip and she lived into her nineties. Kitty had put up with a lot, and nothing would do her but a car once the mother was dead. So watch out for her now!'

At a quarter to eleven Mrs Devereux and Helen, Lily and Paul drove into Blackwater for eleven o'clock Mass.

'Walk straight back to the car now after Mass,' Mrs Devereux said. 'No dawdling around the paper shop, and no talking to people.'

Helen had not been to Mass in Blackwater for well over ten years, since her last summer working at the guest-house. She had forgotten the scene at eleven o'clock Mass: the women in headscarves or mantillas or fancy hats on one side of the church, the men on the other side in suits – even the young boys in suits \a151 and the sense of awe and unease in every face, the silence and the watchfulness, and the soft, old-fashioned edge to everything. The respect and the conformity was broken only by visitors, people from Dublin or from towns who walked up the church and sat together as a family and wore summer-holiday clothes.

When the Mass started she was aware of Paul praying beside her, calling out the responses firmly and loudly. Her grandmother, her mother and Paul went to Communion, but she sat back and watched as each communicant walked down the church in bowed, concentrated prayer. Paul, she noticed, was dressed conservatively and could have fitted in as a local farmer's son, a staunch pillar of the community.

As soon as the Mass was over her grandmother nudged her. 'Come on now, quick, before the crush.'

People she half knew smiled at Helen in recognition as they joined the queue to leave the church. She wished she had worn a scarf or a mantilla like her mother and grandmother. She felt oddly conspicuous, as though by coming here bare-headed and not going to Communion she was trying to make a statement. As soon as they reached the porch of the church, her grandmother caught her by the wrist and began to talk to her animatedly so that no one else could get her attention. Lily had gone ahead; Paul was coming close behind.

'Oh there'll be people raging,' Mrs Devereux said when they got into the car, 'wondering how we slipped by them. People who wouldn't look high up or low down at me for the rest of the year would love to detain me now that I'm with Helen and Lily. And they'll think Paul is your husband, Helen. And they'll say what a clean-looking man she's married. I don't know what they'll say about you, Lily.'