Letters From Constance

by MARY HOCKING

  News travels. Peg was asked questions at school. She has now gone for a walk with Kathleen and Gillian. James is doing something very angry in the boys’ room, clearing, or cleaning, even breaking.

  Dominic has been in touch with the other members of Stephen’s group. They drove the van with the instruments and equipment to the hall; but Stephen seized the opportunity to call on an old girlfriend who lives locally. He has always been attracted to the idea that one can be in two places at the same time. Of course, he had not thought to announce his intention in advance and there was no one at home; by this time he was late. He ran. I don’t need him to tell me, I have seen it too often. He would run oblivious of everything that was happening around him; such matters as wailing ambulances, fire engines, police cars, shattered glass and huddled groups of people would fail to arouse his curiosity once he was in the switched-off state. Even had he noticed something odd at the edge of vision, it would not have alerted him to a major incident. He is living in London where incidents of one kind or another are more common than in Guildford, Surrey.

  Wednesday

  They have released Stephen - whether because they have established that he is innocent or because they have found more promising suspects, we don’t know. Fergus has gone up to London to bring him home. The children are about their daily lives. I don’t like being in the house alone. It is no longer our house; it is a place that can be used in evidence against us. Father John came. When he saw he couldn’t be of spiritual help, he rolled up his sleeves and tidied the shed. But there is a presence here in the house which can’t be cleared away. As I move about I look for things that might betray us to the presence; that photograph album, the books in Fergus’s study, an old programme of an Abbey Theatre production, the box containing your letters. Kathleen says I must not dramatise and I know she is right and I will try not to.

  I think I will send this to you. I shall feel safer if it is in your hands. Don’t telephone.

  C

  Sussex

  October, 1974

  My dear Sheila,

  Linnie and Pavel came down yesterday. She told me that you have this Scottish trip planned and scarcely know whether you will be able to fulfil your engagements, you are so worried about us. One becomes very selfish in these circumstances. It had not occurred to me that this would dislocate your life. Of course you must go. There is nothing you could do here but get in the way - we are all getting in one another’s way. Harpo came and went when she saw the situation.

  Godspeed on your journey. I will try to write to you soon.

  Love,

  Constance

  P.S. Dominic and Manuela have another daughter - Maria. What grief that she should be consigned to a footnote.

  Sussex

  November, 1974

  My dear Sheila,

  So much has been happening there has hardly been time to draw breath. But now there is too much time. Stephen has gone to Ireland and I need to write to you.

  I must try to set this down plainly otherwise it will all jumble again like an overturned jigsaw.

  The police battered down the front door of the house where Stephen lodges in the middle of the night. They had knocked on the door, but who in London would open a door at two o’clock in the morning? The landlady had pulled on her dressing-gown and was about to open an upstairs window when they broke in. This battering would have given due notice to anyone who had need to escape. The police had the back door covered, but there is a skylight on to the roof; Stephen could have gained access to the house next door had he been a desperate man. As it was, all the occupants of the house huddled, locked in the bathroom, terrified.

  At the police station they took fingerprints, swabs, questioned and threatened. He had no idea of what he was accused. They asked him questions about people of whom he had never heard. He was very frightened. I think he will always be a frightened person. You wake in the middle of the night to hear someone breaking down the front door and the forces of law and order rush to your aid. You wake in the middle of the night to hear someone breaking down the front door and it is the forces of law and order. It is a different situation.

  He did not seem angry or resentful, as James is on his behalf. James sees the situation with greater clarity. Stephen is too close and the picture is blurred. There is a part of his life of which he has no reliable memory. He was quiet as if he had walked into himself and closed a door. He, with whom I had had that instinctive communication which renders words unnecessary, seemed scarcely to recognise me. He looked sick and unclean; even after all our loving attentions he continued to look sick and unclean. I had no idea what was going on in his mind, but my heart told me that he would leave us. I can’t believe he will cut himself off from us; though he said, ‘I shall always be a foreigner in England now’, that has nothing to do with us. We love him and there is nothing more important, is there? Is there? When I looked at him, I wondered whether there is something else, at this time in his life, which matters more. If so, I don’t know what it is. Fergus has a better understanding of him now.

  He has gone to stay with Fergus’s brother and sister-in-law in Clare. The laughter has gone out of the house. Pray for him Sheila, that no great harm may come to my darling.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  April, 1975

  My dear Sheila,

  I hadn’t realised so many months had slipped by since we were together on Boxing Day. You mustn’t worry about me. I am getting things into perspective. The police had to find the perpetrators of a terrible crime and there was intense pressure on them; other innocent people might have been killed had they not found the guilty people. But I have found out things I had not known, and I have learnt lessons I cannot unlearn. I have lost my faith in justice and must put my trust elsewhere, withdraw my savings, reinvest.

  Yes, I would like to come to you in July. It would do me good to talk and to have your news, which has been sadly neglected. I want to hear all about that Scottish trip.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  June, 1975

  My dear Sheila,

  I can’t come. Stephen isn’t in Clare now. Fergus went over last week but failed to find him. It is having a bad effect on the children, particularly Cuillane, for whom we had all been so happy.

  I’m sorry to be so brief I hardly dare move beyond range of the telephone bell.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  February, 1976

  Sheila,

  In haste. Stephen is in Dublin. He contacted a priest, who got in touch with Father John. We are flying over on Saturday. Pray for us.

  Love

  Constance

  Sussex

  March, 1976

  My dear Sheila,

  He is working in a bar. He is thinner and looks a bit scruffy; that silky fair hair is as wispy now as Stephen is fragile. He appears not unhappy and is surprisingly adept at keeping on terms with the really hardened drinkers. The owner of the bar, one of those genial Irishmen who likes to tell you what he thinks you want to hear, says he is sure Stephen is not involved in ‘anything that need trouble yous’. The priest, a kindly man who also likes to please but has disciplined himself not to, says he doesn’t think Stephen is in any trouble - ‘but there have been times when I have been wrong’. He says, with more authority, ‘I’d be very surprised to find he was on drugs.’

  I tried to control myself with Stephen but Fergus lost his temper. ‘What do you mean, you didn’t want to cause us pain? What pain had you in mind which is worse than not knowing whether a son is alive or dead?’ For the rest of our short stay with him, Stephen was our son again. He even told us something of what he is doing.

  He is still trying to find out what happened to him and to do that he must find out what happened to other people, not only in the now of life but more distantly. He must piece together a picture of what he so often clowned about when we
had a minor calamity at home - I can hear his voice chanting, ‘ ’Tis the Troubles, Kathleen, has come upon us, the time o’ the Troubles . . .’. Books will not do for Stephen, he needs to find answers in men and women. The Troubles go back a long way, but so do Irish memories. Galway is particularly fruitful ground, he says; there are old women in Galway who can remember the tales their grandparents told of the potato famine. There are old people all over Southern Ireland who claim to do that, but I don’t say so. We don’t want to discourage him, because as he talks we can see him beginning to come alive again. There is even a faint glimpse of that delight which Synge must have felt talking to the people of the Aran Islands.

  But I don’t like to think of him asking these questions. Fergus, too, is uneasy. He warned, ‘Don’t go pursuing your enquiries in isolated places in the Wicklows. You might be misunderstood.’

  ‘I’ll be all right,’ Stephen assured us. ‘No one dies of the past. It’s the present that kills.’

  Oh, Stephen, Stephen! What else has been killing people in Ireland all these years? But he won’t see it any more than he will understand the mentality of people who take sides. He is an information gatherer, there is nothing of the judge in Stephen. I fear he has the unenviable gift of antagonising people of all shades of opinion.

  I pray it may bring increasing delight and no harm, this search of his.

  I will come to you next month. I so long to be with you.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  January, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  I am so happy for you. Hooray for Linnie and Pavel! Harpo came hotfoot with the news, so before Linnie phoned we were celebrating the best news to come our way in quite a time.

  It has thrown Harpo into a state of confusion. I watched with amusement while this stout, middle-aged woman juggled her precious principles in the air and finally let them come crashing to the ground. And not owing to lack of skill did they eventually elude her clutching fingers; it was the bigness of heart which dashed them to her feet. ‘There will be some problems because he is coloured and nominally a Hindu.’ This, I was to understand, was a plus for the union. ‘But the difficulties will be all hers. She will have to sink herself in his way of life.’ The feminist was momentarily brought face to face with the racial crusader, but nothing came of this potentially interesting confrontation. ‘What the Hell, when they are so happy?’ And there she stood before us, the Harpo of Harwich and HMS Dipper, eager, innocent, trusting that she would find that crock of gold at the end of the rainbow. It’s not for her now and she knows it, but she still believes it is there and her joy that Linnie has found it is unbounding. She is probably the most generous person we shall ever know, Sheila.

  Linnie seems to have been firm on the matter of the wedding, doesn’t she? ‘I told him,’ she said, ‘that if all his family were to be there, then all my family must come and that would include every single Byrne.’ She hopes Stephen will come. I didn’t want to introduce a note of sadness, so I said, ‘We’ll see’, but I know he won’t ever come back to England.

  Toby came for the weekend, looking like a Viking with a handsome beard. Peg told him she didn’t like it. ‘It’s not as if you had a weak chin.’ He shaved it off. I was rather surprised.

  The next time our paths cross the ground will be strewn with flowers.

  Our love to you,

  Constance

  Sussex

  May, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  I hope Linnie was not too upset. He must have become a very unhappy man to have written such a letter to his daughter on the occasion of her marriage. It’s not as though he had ever shown any sign of racial prejudice, is it? You are very wise. It is, as you say, as though he had expected you all to remain unchanged when he left, like those legendary figures who are turned to stone and will only be brought to life again by some great act of reconciliation. Perhaps the fact that you are all living and breathing has denied him the hope of eventually redeeming himself? I heard one of his pieces on the radio last week. Very jangled it was. The BBC pundit tied himself in knots trying to justify it.

  Dominic has summoned me to London to look after Teresa and Maria when Manuela gives birth. I grumble about this, ‘I didn’t have parents to dash round whenever I needed an extra pair of hands.’

  ‘Your generation had servants,’ my children chorus.

  ‘Whenever did you see a servant about the house?’

  They respond with a roll-call of daily helps. ‘And Grannie’s generation had cooks as well.’

  It is astonishing how little they seem to have picked up in the way of domestic history. ‘The Wicks,’ I told them, ‘can trace their family back to the nineteenth century unservanted.’

  ‘Well, Daddy’s family had servants.’

  ‘They had no gas, no electricity, intermittent water supply and nothing that could pass as heating, but they did have servants.’

  They don’t listen. They know best and in a few weeks (or earlier should Manuela so dispose) I shall be packed off to London, leaving Peg and Gillian to quarrel over who looks after the family.

  Do you think you might come up to London to see your publisher while I am looking after Teresa and Maria? Wouldn’t it be a treat to have a day out together? One is so gloriously anonymous in London.

  Your hopeful

  Constance

  London

  July, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  A grandson, praise be to God! Giles to rhyme with eels, but a grandson is a grandson whatever the name.

  What a glorious day we had on Wednesday. I shed years. We must meet in London again.

  Love,

  Constance

  Sussex

  November, 1977

  Sheila,

  I tried to get you on your friend’s telephone, but there was no reply. There is no gentle way to write this. Stephen is dead, found shot in the back of the head in a field in County Clare. We don’t know any more and even if we did, I can’t write about it. We are flying over tomorrow. Will you think of us, please, and pray if you are able.

  Love,

  Constance

  County Clare

  November, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  We buried Stephen today in this stony little town. A triangular green outside the church, a few scrubby trees and a child’s bicycle with a broken wheel lying on the grass, old men on a bench outside the pub. A grey day and cold. Rain on the wind but it came to nothing. The children were all there and Toby - did you know he meant to come? Fergus is well-nigh broken. I felt nothing much. As I looked down at the coffin I thought in a detached way that it should be me lying there. It would make more sense. The priest had recently come from Armagh. He had performed this office too many times. No words were needed between us. I am trying to keep a picture of his seamed face and hurt eyes in my mind because I have nothing of my own to store away at this time.

  As we walked back through the town to Fergus’s brother’s house a thin drizzle started. There were pallid lights in windows. The air was raw. I wanted to go on walking but someone, I think it was Kathleen, steered me into the house. I said, ‘I’d like to go down to the sea for a time’ and someone said, ‘There isn’t any sea here.’ The house is small to hold so many people, I didn’t like it at all. There is sea, a longish way, perhaps, but there is sea in Clare.

  We shall stay on for a few days. The children go back tomorrow, except for Cuillane. What about her college? I shall probably write to you again. It is important to fill up the day.

  Love,

  Constance

  County Clare

  November, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  We talked to the farmer who found Stephen today. He tells us that Stephen was shot in the back of the head. There were no bruises on him, his wrists hadn’t been tied and there was no sign of a struggle. The police confirm this. I like to think that he died walking away from someone, as innoce
nt as ever that his questioning might be misinterpreted. I should think that is very likely, wouldn’t you? I should like to push it further than that, imagine a bright day and a smile in his eyes. Only I can’t bring his face to mind. So I am left with Stephen Byrne, died of asking questions of the wrong person somewhere in County Clare.

  Did I mention that Fergus’s mother came? She is very old now and doesn’t offer much in the way of comfort, for which I am grateful.

  I have this craving for water: still, dark water. When I am in bed I think of it and then I go to sleep. Strange that one does sleep.

  Oh, I forgot. We went to the field where Stephen was found, the three of us, Fergus, myself and Cuillane. A green, sodden, mournful place at this time of the year. I suddenly, very briefly, saw him lying there, head to one side, a smudge of dirt down one cheek and grass in his hair. Fergus cried. I can’t. My eyes are dry and full of hot dust; it hurts when I close the lids. Cuillane’s face is like a piece of blank parchment.

  Tomorrow we leave.

  Love,

  Constance

  Airborne

  November, 1977

  My dear Sheila,

  A sunny day and the coast of Ireland beneath us, green and intricate with bays and promontories. As we were waiting to board, a man who was sitting next to me in the lounge said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ll be glad to see the back of this country.’

  ‘We are Irish,’ I told him.

  He was embarrassed. ‘I thought JOM were English.’

  ‘No. I am Irish.’