Sunrise with Sea Monster

by Neil Jordan

  There was a moon over the harbour, forcing itself through weak fingers of mist. His eyes scanned the empty promenade. You still feel conspicuous? I asked him and led him down the seaweed-encrusted steps towards the boat. We stood then, on the gently shifting boards and appraised each other.

  You know what this is about? he asked after a silence.

  A letter, I hazarded.

  He nodded and took an envelope from his pocket. We couldn't make head nor tail of it first, he said. And who is we? I asked, more as a matter of formality than anything else. You damn well know who we are, he said. The movement. I suspected, I told him. Then, he said, we brought it to a mathematician in Trinity who cracked it for us. Heidelberg. Heisenberg, I corrected him. The Leipzig paper on the uncertainty principle. Was never a great hand at the sums myself, he said. But you know this Rhett Butler? Rhett Butler, I told him, is a pseudonym. So I take it your name isn't Scarlett? he said and smiled for the first time. I know your name is Gore, he said. What I want to know is who's this other geezer.

  A German, I told him, with intellectual pretensions. He interrogated me in a Spanish prison. Arranged my release.

  So you two boyos had something in common?

  You could say that.

  He claims you're his only contact here.

  He's wrong. I now share that distinction with you.

  But you've met him in the flesh. Face to face.

  Yes.

  And he's the full shilling?

  What do you mean?

  I mean the real thing, the genuine article, not some two-faced fly-by-night trying to pull a fast one.

  He wears the uniform of the Abwehr, I said, if that's what you mean. He made a pact with me. In exchange for my release, I would make certain contacts.

  With us, he said. I nodded.

  Then why didn't you?

  The boat shifted under us. I looked at his face in the moonlight, eyes not at all unfriendly, mouth tough and uncompromising and a pair of shoulders bigger than an ox. The thought of him angry made me feel uneasy.

  I thought, I said, if I bided my time one of you would come to me.

  Wise, he said.

  Because as we both know, I said, the walls have ears.

  The times that are in it, he said.

  What about them? I asked.

  Turn your friend into your enemy.

  And vice versa, I ventured.

  But you're clean, he said. Above suspicion. You went with the commies to the bother in Spain.

  On an impulse, I told him.

  So where does your interest in the Hun come from?

  England's difficulty, I told him, is Ireland's opportunity.

  He stared at me hard, one hulking shoulder covering the moon. I held his stare, wondering would my story hold water.

  Write back to him, he said. Tell him you've made contact with us. Tell him we'll come up with a shopping-list.

  He turned abruptly and walked back up the barnacled steps.

  Where do I reach you? I shouted after him.

  You don't, he said. You'll see us when you see us.

  I walked back to the house and felt unease in the air, like an evening mist. I took out the yellowing copy of the Heisenberg paper and scribbled on the flyleaf—have made contact. Shopping-list will follow. I then thumbed through the pages of equations, descriptions of Jean's mirrored cube, of ideal coal-dust and ideal perceptors and matched each letter of the note to a number. I wrote each number down on a virgin piece of my father's notepaper, stamped and addressed it and left it on the bureau. I woke to the same unease, walked down the promenade to post it. Then, with the envelope half inside the mouth of the letterbox, I changed my mind and pulled it back. They would intercept it, I knew, in the Castle, and I could save myself the bother and any further suspicion by handing it to them myself. So I walked over the tracks towards a waiting train.

  Mr Soames, I requested of the guard in the hut in the cobbled yard. Tell him Scarlett wants to see him.

  Your own name would do, Soames said, when I eventually reached him.

  Aren't pseudonyms mandatory in these affairs? I asked.

  What affairs are these? he asked.

  Affairs of betrayal.

  Who are you betraying? he asked.

  Just about everyone, I said. And now that burly bogman who threw stones at my window last night.

  Ah, he said with an air of someone reaching the inevitable. What was his name?

  Wouldn't say. But he'd got hold of my letter.

  How?

  Through you?

  He let me stew without an answer for a moment.

  Said he was from the movement. So I wrote a reply and was about to post it to Germany, but thought I'd save you the trouble of intercepting it.

  I handed him the letter. He let it sit there between us like an unspoken secret.

  What does it say?

  That I've made contact. That they'll be in touch with me later with a shopping-list.

  You enjoy this, don't you? Soames said.

  Not at all, I said. I thought I'd no option.

  But you're good at it. The dead-pan delivery, the unconcern. You don't care, which allows you to enjoy it.

  What I would enjoy most, I said, is to get out of here.

  He smiled, and I stood. I moved across the room, then hesitated.

  Can't bear to leave? he asked.

  The letter? I asked.

  What about it?

  Will you send it to them?

  Why do you need to know? he asked, and I thought about it.

  Thank you, I said. I don't.

  On the train back I thought of whole stories of conspiracies and betrayals sitting on his desk, unknown to anyone but him. I wondered could I take comfort from that thought. As I trundled through the hills of eucalyptus bending towards the sea, I stared out the window and could see Rose, myself and father as a triangular cocoon, an equation known only to ourselves that related to no known numerical system. There were energies there yet to be discovered, like the ones now blowing the world to shreds.

  The weather itself seemed to match our triangular mood. Over the next week the sky stayed filled with a low cloud; there wasn't a hint of rain, but only the humid heat that brings the flies out. I worked my boats, tried to forget the business of betrayal, got to enjoy the muscular ease with which I could draw the nets. I stayed unwashed for the most part, left my body covered in a film of salt. The humidity kept the fish way down, so we began to journey further out in search of them. From the Kish lighthouse to Howth, in a wide arc from Howth to Wicklow town, past tankers and coastguard ships and the distant specks of frigates on the horizon. The coast became a thin line behind us, our nets became entangled with porbeagle and basking shark, as if in the depths below us a more essential life was emerging. The swells were slow and strong, the sky seemed lower each day and yet the heat kept on, encasing us in its humid bubble. Then late one afternoon, four miles out from Baltray, the storm broke.

  It was a southwesterly, whipping from the tip of Lambay Island, turning the sea into a garden of white. The boy yelled at me when I was dozing at the rudder in the heat and I turned to see the white froth around the island, the dark water advancing before it with the rainclouds over, as if being pummelled by unseen pellets. I kicked the engine into service and turned the rudder towards the mouth of the Boyne, where the pillars round the estuary sat still bathing in unnatural sunlight. It seemed impossible the one vista could be so peaceful, the other so full of fury, and I kicked the outboard motor into as much action as it would bear, the kid's hands bleeding trying to drag in the nets while his brother grabbed him by the waist to give him more traction. Then the wind hit us first, slewing us northwards; after it the rain and hail, like pebbles from above trying to pound us back into the element that held us, and after that the waves. Then the light was gone, and everything was water, the spray the waves threw round us, the rain driving from above, the shore vanished in a driving haze. There was exhilaration in
the chaos, in the loss of all reference to boundaries of land, sea or air. I yelled at the kids to let the nets go, grab whatever they could while I hung on to the stern and managed to turn the boat straight into the breakers. The crash of each wave seemed strong enough to tear the boat asunder but I guided it straight into each crest, sensing any other course would pitch it over. I saw a guillemot whirled by upside down, a sheaf of lightning course through the hanging curtain of rain then saw Lambay pass by me and realised the wind was changing. I was being driven out to sea and southwards. I thought of a grave in water: not a quiet meditative one, but the chaotic murderous wetness that surrounded me, and as a mountainous wave came towards me prepared myself for it. The one boy ran towards me and screamed, and then the other, the first with his hand held out and I grabbed, the other grabbed his and then the wave hit, as if the sea had been turned upside down to pummel us from below, then suck us in a long low wash towards itself but we, all three of us, managed to hang on. And after that wave had coursed down the gunnel and I saw both kids gasping at the stern, I knew, whatever it would throw at us, that we would survive.

  Four hours later it abated; we found ourselves three miles east of the Kish, the motor silent. We pulled the oars out and rowed. The moon came through the scudding clouds and after a time even the clouds stopped moving. The wet and freshened air, an unnatural, clean severity about it all, not a breath moving, but the slow reluctant swells of the water as if it remembered what had gone before. The moon, percolated in the moving sea, and the sense of having survived, the godly certainty of it, the exhaustion behind every movement and the knowledge that after all that, one was still alive. There were fish leaping clear of the water but we couldn't be bothered to lower the nets. We rowed relentlessly towards Dublin Bay and thanked God we weren't a sailboat.

  We found our way to the harbour and tied the boat to its cousin and I walked then, past the pub and boathouse to the terrace. There was a foot of water flooding the promenade. The lights in the house were on and she was standing at the door.

  She had the kind of relief in her face that would have been unwarranted by anything but the flood, spreading down from the houses towards the Head, the moonlight reflected in it. She ran towards me, throwing up arcs of brine with her slippered feet and fell on to my shoulders. Rose, I said, Rose, stop it, but I knew the words were no use, the gladness was unstoppable. It was as if I had arranged the chaos for her. I lifted her out of the water and waded through it myself, her chin embedded in my shoulder. She had lost one, she whispered, and couldn't bear losing the other. I told her to stop it again but knew I was lost in turn.

  She brought me into the kitchen and stood me by the range; grabbed towel after towel out of the hot-press. I remembered her standing there all those years ago, Maisie drying her clothes off the range and wrapping my father's greatcoat around her. She wrapped the same coat round me now. Where is he? I asked her. She told me he had sat at the upstairs window all day, looking out on the storm. He always enjoyed storms, I told her, the play of lightning on the water. I bent my head to the towel she held out and let her dry my hair. Her fingers, strong like a peasant's, drew shivers from my scalp. I put my arms round her waist and undid the bow that tied her smock. The smock fell open and I traced my finger down her slip and felt the sharp bones of her hips and the suspenders beneath them. Donal, she said, Donal. I know, I said, what you are about to say. You don't, she said, and pressed her thighs against my hand. I drew her slip upwards and saw the garments beneath them, much like the ones she draped on the range when I was so much younger. There was the soft tinkling of the rigging of the boats out on the harbour. She kept kneading my hair until I raised my head and brought my lips to hers. She let me kiss her, her lips flat and surprised, her eyes wide open. I drew my hand up and traced the lines above her cheekbones. I've watched you grow older, I said. I drew her through the kitchen then, to the room where the piano was. I put the Rachmaninov on the gramophone and as the first chords filled the room stood looking with her at the water covering the grass outside, lapping up against the walls of the smaller houses, the moonlight tracing a broken line from above the Head. She drew me down to the couch then, opened my father's coat and put her arms around me.

  We awoke with the first light. It was pale and aqueous, coming through the front window. I could see the calmed waters spreading down the length of the promenade. Rose's head was in my arms, her hair spreading over my chest like seaweed. I drew my arm from under her slowly and placed his coat over her dishevelled body. I went to the window. The water covered everything, the telegraph poles sprouting from it, the railings, occasional cars, everything suffused in its greenish glow. I thought of father nearby and wondered had he felt her absence. I went into the kitchen, prepared some hot milk and took it to his room.

  He was in his chair by the window, the blanket over his knees, staring in perplexed concentration at the vista outside. I stood by the door for a moment, waiting for him to turn. When he didn't, I walked towards him and held the cup to his lips.

  Did you enjoy the storm? I asked him. The eyes turned towards me for a moment, the same perplexed, furious blue. They met mine, then turned to the window again. I brought the cup to his lips again and he drank, still looking outside. Did you miss her? I asked, to myself as much as him, and his eyes kept staring outside while he drank, obediently, like a child. I wondered what cognition went on behind those eyes, whether it was as innocent, as intuitive as the child he seemed to be. Then I wheeled him towards the door and along to the kitchen.

  I cooked breakfast for the three of us. After a time Rose came in, everything neat now under her smock, her hair tied into a bun behind her head. Her eyes flashed to mine with a mixture of guilt and desire and I put a plate in front of her. Did he sleep? she asked me and I told her that I could only assume he did. Her foot reached mine underneath the table and as I fed him strips of bacon I could almost imagine I saw in his face the hint of a smile. Look Rose, I said, he's smiling. Bacon, she said. He always liked it.

  Over the next few days the floods subsided, leaving a patina of brown sand over the promenade. I fixed my boats, bought some new nets and in between times wheeled him along the prom through the diminishing waters. He seemed inert and strangely peaceful as if the lapping water everywhere brought a kind of quiet to him. I pushed him up the path to the Head and bumped him along the cliff walk to Greystones. I pointed out cormorants to him, a guillemot, a kestrel flying by with a mole in its claws. Do you remember, I asked him, you did the same for me? She was between us like a glue, it seemed, like the fringe of mist that sat on the horizon, merging the sea with the sky, merging the present and past into a continuous wave. I would return him to her in the house by the harbour, take the boats out when the tides were up and work the bay as long as there was light left. I would come back, stinking of fish, and find her at the piano, him sitting in the kitchen by the warmth of the range. The last traces of the storm had vanished from the promenade, but with it everything was changed. He was like a child between us, following our movements with his eyes, waiting on our ministrations, and we looked after him like one.

  She became someone quite different. I noticed the odour of dried flowers, the feeling of an empty room in a country house on a hot summer's day. There was a field and we would wander through it, lie down on the places where the hayricks had been, mushrooms pushing up through the haystalks to fondle our backs. The traces of flour and baking powder on her fingers would bring me back, to the country again, to a kitchen that opened out on to a cobbled yard where hens pecked and scrabbled at the handfuls of meal she threw them. She would lie on the sofa, the afternoon sun coming through the window, striking the dust we had risen from the cushions, and button the blouse again around her breast, Chopin playing on the gramophone and she'd smile, as if she was thinking of something a long way away and tell me the Polonaise was about to end. Then again, she'd say, draping her hair over the edge of the settee, you could always put it on again.

 
She was several people, I found. She was the Rose I had seen on the first day there, hair in a tumble as her stockings dried by the range, eyes smiling in an uncluttered, girlish way, promising friendship in her smile, and trying to be older than her years. Then she was the Rose I met on my first day back, the woman of someone's house, possessed by a destiny that emanated from upstairs, distracted, with the blonde hair uncombed and the eyes preoccupied. Then she was the Rose with the delicious and exact sense of her own pleasures, who would say no, wait, and clench her teeth as if the muscular rigour coursing through her could be prolonged for ever. A green light would come into her eyes, as if a forest had been illuminated inside her. On some afternoons she was the Rose her name implied, the roses you see on faded wallpaper and the patterns of dresses, an absolutely sweet presence in the odd arrangements of that household. On days when the light mist came down the headland and the sun broke through it intermittently, filling the rooms with a silver, elegiac light.

  I could say I felt some guilt, but that would be a lie. One of those retrospective kinds of lies again. I felt no guilt whatsoever; each morning provided its own elation, I would rise, and walk to the shop by the station, buy the Irish Times, read what news there was of the conflagration over there. I would buy milk and bread and bacon and walk back as the sun illuminated the amusement arcades. She would be up by the time I came back, have the old man washed and cleaned so we would bump him into the kitchen again, I would comb his beard and hair while she cooked his—our—breakfast. He seemed sweet, like a child that completed our presence, the child we didn't have. His eyes with that cornflower blue that grew more startling every day, I would sometimes find them unaccountably on me, then when I turned away and back, would find them staring out of the window again. Birds would grab the attention of those eyes, the birds whose nests he used to catalogue along the walk to Greystones. I would read him the leaders from the Times as she fed him, and assume he understood. I could imagine him in any guise from his expression; the kindly patriarch, in the quiet autumn of his years, beyond all rage now, looked after by those who cared for him most. Or I could imagine a fierce intelligence behind those cornflower eyes, one that stared, saw everything behind their apparently random movement. Despair I could see there if I wanted to, hope that his condition would change, quiet devotion for Rose, the mother of all his attentions. I would imagine these things, maybe in lieu of the truth, which was, I suspected, that he took in very little.