The Sea and the Silence

by Peter Cunningham

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘We’re going to lead these fellas a right old spin,’ Tom said.

  I could not bear to imagine that Mr Rafter had gone straight up to Longstead and alerted them to my behaviour, or that Nick and Bella would have me pursued like a thief rather than allow me my happiness; but for the past few months, I had lived in the realm of the unimaginable and this was little different. We crossed the canal bridge and came to fields of cattle. Tom forced the car to its maximum speed down a long, straight road. Little activity disturbed the village of Rathmines. We lurched through two bends, then climbed the tree-lined incline for Rathgar. The saloon was a confidant fifty yards behind and, compared to us, moving easily.

  ‘They may not know Frank was in the hotel,’ Tom said. ‘They may think we still have to meet him.’

  We plunged downhill and along by the Dodder River. It was past four o’clock. Boys kicked a football at one end of a field in which cows were ambling home for milking. The dying sun still warmed one side of the street in the village of Rathfarnham. Church bells rang. I wondered what church we would marry in, and who would be there, or if the troubles — that persistent word that meant so much — would always mean our having to live somewhere other than in Ireland. In open country, the car began to slow against the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. Behind us, the saloon reduced its speed to match. Tom pulled out his watch. He said,

  ‘The way I see it, the farther we drive, the longer the car behind will follow us and the safer it will be for Frank to catch the sailing.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘He’s safe as long as they stay behind us.’

  ‘And what do I do?’

  Tom’s big head was down. ‘You could join him later.’

  ‘How will I find him?’

  ‘He’ll contact me like he did before.’

  We were now back on tiny winding roads barely wider than the car.

  ‘Can’t you go faster?’

  ‘I can try, but every five minutes we go is another five minutes to the boat.’

  The car groaned with every new mile. I didn’t need to look back any more. I had something unique I could give him — his freedom. For by keeping on, by leading them after us, Frank would board the boat unharmed. I began to shake. I could not bear to think of losing him again.

  ‘Damn it!’ Tom swore as thick steam began to rise from the car’s stubby radiator. He threw the Morris around the next bend, and the one after, and the old chassis creaked. The road was potholed and the uncut hedges scraped its sides. Tom wrestled the wheel and the engine whined. On a straight stretch it appeared, for a moment, that we might have lost our pursuers, but then the saloon loomed into view, steadied, and with ease made up the difference it had lost. A steep downhill appeared. Tom aimed the car at the bottom without caution. The air was sucked from us as we dived. We’d reached the hill’s base before the saloon had appeared at the top.

  ‘Do you think we can shake them off?’

  ‘Are you religious?’ Tom asked, sweat on his face. ‘Because if you are, this would be a good time to say a prayer.’

  The radiator steam now made it difficult to see. A bend came up and we swung into it. Then another. The car seemed to career without purpose. I saw ditches head on, then, road, then a bend so sharp there seemed no way out of it. We scraped through. An ass-cart appeared in the centre of the road as if dropped there from the sky. We veered madly, striking one of its shafts as we passed.

  ‘Christ!’ Tom shouted.

  The Morris slewed out of control, hitting both ditches. I saw the cart including its driver and the donkey, tilt over into the crown of the road. The Morris swerved on, sickeningly, then ploughed along the ditch and with a great bang, stopped.

  ‘Tom?’

  Eels of blood wriggled down Tom’s face. The braying of the upturned animal behind seemed to be the only sound. Then there was the roar of a powerful engine and brakes that screamed even louder than the ass. I looked back in time to see the saloon hit donkey and cart full square, spin once, then crash nose first into the stone pier of a gate.

  I got out. Tom climbed out my side.

  ‘Push,’ he said.

  I got into the ditch behind the Morris, but I doubt that my efforts had any effect. I was aware that the saloon car now lacked most of its front section and that the donkey, feet to heaven, was dead. A man, the one who had been on the cart, lay inert in the ditch. Groans came from inside the saloon.

  ‘Come on!’ Tom urged, red drops glistening on the tip of his chin and his nose.

  I was ankle deep in muck. Tom got an inch on the back of the Morris, then another. Veins stood out massively at his temples. The car moved up, but then fell back and I sat down heavily.

  ‘Come on!’

  I scrambled up and we pushed again. I felt possessed of strength beyond reason. All at once, the car sprang from the wet hole into which it had fallen. Tom dug deeper with his shoulder and kept pushing until the four wheels were on the hard road.

  ‘God Almighty, I’m unfit,’ he panted. Then he went around to the front. ‘Say that prayer now,’ he said and swung the handle.

  The car seemed to sigh, then shudder. He swung again and nothing happened. I prayed: Dear God, for my love. Please. Tom swung. There was a joyful explosion of life. Tom looked back at the mayhem in the road.

  ‘God save Ireland,’ he said.

  It was dark as we made our way to Dún Laoghaire by way of roads that had never known a signpost, over moors where sheep roamed, their eyes yellow in the car’s headlights. I held Tom’s watch in my hands. It was just past seven. I willed the car on, but there was a speed beyond which steam reappeared.

  ‘These sailings are never on time,’ Tom kept saying.

  ‘What will he do if I don’t turn up?’

  ‘He has to go, Iz. It’s too dangerous for him here.’

  I put my head down so that I would not have to witness every new, agonising mile. We had somehow crossed the mountains and were now chugging up the coast by the seaside town of Bray. The car’s engine coughed and struggled and fine puffs of steam wafted in zephyr-like beneath my feet. I caught sight of the dark bay which our mail boat would soon cross, the grey-streaked night water and the distant hump of Howth on the other side. It was now half past seven.

  ‘Oh, God!’

  A long vessel was putting out to sea.

  ‘That’s not her,’ Tom said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘That’s a cargo ship.’

  I could not speak. I would die, I knew, if I were to see his ship on its way. Fresh sweat had broken out the breadth of Tom’s blood-streaked forehead and was causing the blood that had congealed there to drip anew.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll make it,’ he said.

  The road curved inland and the sea was lost. We passed through another village of dim streetlights. Abruptly, Tom swung right, down a narrow lane with house fronts on one side and a high wall on the other. Then the sea jumped out at us, the black vastness of it, and I could see the great, brooding outline of a ship at moorings and smoke rising from her single funnel.

  ‘That’s her,’ Tom grinned.

  I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and tell him how I would never forget him, how he had risked so much not for some cause or spent idea, but just for his friend. He was straining now to see as we slowed down and drove along the grey wharf by the mail boat’s stern.

  ‘Where did he say he’d meet us?’

  ‘He didn’t. But he’ll have to be somewhere near the gangway. He’s got your ticket,’ Tom said.

  People were walking back to the quayside, many of them turning and waving up to passengers on deck. Lights flickered yellowly. The Morris jolted to a halt and we got out. The whole quayside reverberated to a massive blast from the mail boat’s hooter. Then I saw him. He must have been standing in the shadow of heaped crates and boxes near the foot of the gangplank. I laughed. I wanted to tell him how incredible he
was, how handsome, how beautiful I felt. I started to run. I laughed out loud. I wanted to tell him about the upturned ass-cart, about the wrecked saloon car of the stupid guards or whoever they had been, about Nick’s meanness and about how Tom was the best friend in the world. And he saw me laughing and he opened his mouth to tell me something, and he too was laughing, perhaps at the thought of how he’d squeezed out of the Wicklow, or maybe he was thinking of how this was just the first of many voyages that lay ahead of us, and how it had always been meant, from the very start, to work out for the best like this.

  And then Tom screamed.

  ‘No! Frank! It’s a trap!’

  We were converging on the gangplank from both sides. I turned just as the boat’s hooter erupted again, and saw Tom’s mouth open, but could hear nothing. And then we were alone, the three of us in the whole area, but not alone because all around us were men with outstretched arms, pointing, and I saw Tom catch himself with both hands at his chest and spin.

  ‘Frank?’

  From far off I heard a man’s shout.

  ‘Halt!’

  Frank was ten yards from me. As he ran, he reached into the pocket of his jacket. I saw him gasp as the air was punched out of him, then heard the sharp snap of gunfire. His head went back and his body seemed to buck, as if trying to shrug off the attack, as if this was something he had often dealt with before. He fell, one leg twisted beneath him.

  ‘Frank!’

  He looked asleep. He would open his eyes now and reach for my hand. I went to him. Blood thick on his lips. In his nostrils.

  ‘He’s not dead!’

  I fought them. My arms were held.

  ‘Frank!’

  I screamed until one of them clamped his hand over my mouth. I bit him and he cursed and slapped me hard. I was glad he did that, but I would have preferred if he’d shot me. I lunged at him and he hit me again.

  ‘Take this mad bitch away.’

  As two big guards in uniform caught hold of me, I saw one of the plainclothes men squat down and gingerly catch Frank’s wrist and pluck out his hand from his jacket. The brown envelope with the tickets was between his fingers.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1945

  On the first day of April, it began to rain before I got up, and when I did, eventually, the lawns of Longstead were mostly under an inch of water. Mother would be unable to set up out of doors. On the back landing beyond my bedroom, the strategic metal pail would prove its long-time use as the leak in some inaccessible gully reconfirmed its existence.

  What had come to me out of the quivering emptiness of the intervening weeks was the silence. No one said anything. I could understand how Mother, who had her own grief to deal with, and the remaining staff at Longstead, who must have been fearful for the roof over their heads, would remain taciturn about an event that had made the front pages of the papers — two suspected subversives shot dead on the quay in Dún Laoghaire and the arrest and subsequent release of a Miss Ismay Seston in connection with the same incident — but the people I might have expected to comment never did. Neither Mr Rafter nor his son, John, when I encountered them, ever mentioned what everyone knew, but rather their eyes assumed an empty expression as if I were formless, someone on whom it was not possible to focus. The Misses Carr drove over in a trap pulled by matching bays and twittered around Mother for most of one afternoon, then clipped away at four p.m., having never allowed their eyes to rest on me for more than the briefest moment. Neither did Bella nor Nick in the days before their delayed departure speak to me about the events in Dún Laoghaire, nor of the murder of the man I loved and his friend; I was glad, for I did not wish to discuss it with them, but it still amazed me that they had not brought it up. No word came from Mount Penrose. That brought me no relief, for I knew Norman had been walking our acres and that he knew I was at home. Had he decided to be done with me he would, in Penrose fashion, have written, terminating our engagement and probably asking for the return of his mother’s ring. In reality, he was biding his time, like a patient hunter awaiting the low point in his quarry’s resistance before striking home. In a wider sense, I expected farther visits from the guards, or army, or indeed from newspapers; there were none. It was as if something too shameful to address had taken place. Soon it would be as if it had all never happened.

  I felt at first benumbed, then fearful, then almost nothing. I slept for days. I could see his face in every detail and clung to that image. I rarely went outside, staying upstairs in my room, sleeping. That was where I did my crying.

  Time became shapeless. On freezing nights, I crawled to the window like something fossilised and beheld the obscenely peeping stars. Weights dragged me down from where I wheeled in dizzy rings. In the ever folding darkness, my arms flapped and my shoulders stammered their helplessness. I could grasp nothing, just lay there, parched of mercy. Dawns came in atoms of blinding daylight that bore into my head. I reeled beneath the blur of awful colours and through my pounding blood saw the new day with its dull red rind. Cries of grief burst within me but were smothered as they floated upwards. Barely knowing, I skimmed the icy steppes of my new memory for one extra moment of him. I craved that speck of time between his life and death so that I could ease myself into it and remain there forever. I began to wonder what had happened to the love we had shared, because we had kindled something beyond ourselves, a force too strong to be kept underground. I felt at times irrationally certain that what I had been through was a dream and that I would see his living face again.

  The love I had known both buoyed and drowned me, for there were times when I knew I had lived rarely. We had been wonderful together. We had infused one another. I saw the silent people and pitied them.

  A form arrived in late April from the Land Commission, requesting it be filled in and returned. A statement of the activities they knew did not exist on the acres they were poised to grab. I threw it to one side.

  On the first day of May, as I got up from bed and saw the rain but did not care about it, and heard the dull drone of defeat, an awful nausea broke me out sweating all over and I stumbled to the enamel basin. I needed to lie down. I was drained and sick. Perhaps I was dying. Perhaps the flame we had kindled together was now going out and me with it. Good, I thought, and curled up and went to sleep. I ate nothing that day and was sick again that evening and the next morning. I could think then only of the financial burden of a long-term illness, of the length of time it had taken Daddy to die and of his final degradation.

  The doctor who had come to Daddy lived in Trim; I went down to the village one day and asked John Rafter to drive me to him.

  ‘You look well, Iz,’ he remarked.

  It was all glib charity, I thought, no one could bear to face me with truth any more. John left me out in Trim; I went and sat for an hour before I was seen. The doctor’s warm hands probed and pressed. He looked into my eyes.

  ‘A little sample, if you wouldn’t mind, Miss Seston,’ he said and handed me a kidney bowl before going discreetly behind a screen and turning on the taps of his wash hand basin.

  He took the results of my performance and returned behind his screen. He came back out, a wry look on his face.

  ‘You probably know already,’ he said.

  ‘Know what?’

  He looked at me sceptically. ‘You’re pregnant, Miss Seston.’

  John Rafter was waiting for me in the middle of the town.

  ‘Are you all right, Iz?’ he asked, frowning.

  I smiled. ‘I’m better now, thank you.’

  I made him drop me by our gates and walked up the avenue, feeling the wisdom of nature. Rooks flapped high in the trees and I was happy for them, for I was back at the beginning and time lay before me in abundance. As I neared the house, Mother waved to me from her place in the sun house. Inside, I sat at the desk in our little used drawing-room, opened the middle drawer of it and took out a sheet of notepaper. I was both crying and laughing as I wrote, for I knew this would work. My words
spilled across the page with fond purpose. The silent world would be outraged when it learned of my decision, but I did not care. There were worse outcomes than this, far worse. I signed the letter, put it in an envelope and addressed it to Ronnie Shaw Esq., Sibrille, Monument.

  EPILOGUE

  The taxi made its way along Thomas Street, past the Dublin Guinness brewery, then swung down by Christchurch and on to South Circular Road. Over Leeson Street Bridge and past the Burlington, it made the turn into Ballsbridge.

  The pace of change bewildered Dick Coad. Even by the standards of a country solicitor, his understanding of global economics was limited, yet he deplored the daily erosion of history, the charge to transform by erasure. The house, on a quiet road near the embassy, came into view. It had changed little from the day he had come up with her in 1957. The same solidity, the same front garden, and back. The same chestnut tree — now it had changed, had grown, its leaves already yellowing in early September, reaching to the bay windows of the first floor where she had slept.

  Dick paid the taxi, pushed in the gate and walked up the path. He had been in love with her, he knew, but so too he was sure had every man who had ever met her.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Coad.’

  ‘Miss Toms.’

  He followed her in and, by habit, sat in his usual chair before leaping up again.

  ‘I’m sorry, I normally…’

  ‘Oh, sit, sit,’ said Bibs Toms, ‘and I have Earl Grey ready, because I know you and she always took it.’

  He watched her bring over the tray. She was still a big woman, although bent now and with much of the bulk gone from her.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ Bibs said, putting down the tea. ‘I never imagined this would happen. I don’t deserve it.’

  ‘It is a wonderful outcome and one on which her heart was fixed,’ Dick said and savoured the fragrant tea. ‘You were very good to her.’

  ‘She was my friend.’

  ‘You nursed her. You allowed her to die here, at home.’