Secrets of the Lighthouse (2 page)

I turn and face the congregation. Then I scream as loudly as I can. My voice reverberates around the chapel, bouncing off the ancient walls and ceiling, but only the birds outside hear my cry
and take to the skies in panic. Conor’s eyes rest steadily on the coffin, his face contorted with pain. Finbar and Ida sit between their father and Conor’s mother, as still as waxworks,
and I turn to the coffin wherein lies my death. My death, you understand, but not my life – for I am my life and I am eternal.

And yet no one knows the truth: that I stand before them as an actress who’s taken her final bow and stepped off the stage. The cliché is true. My costume and mask lie in that
coffin, mistaken for me, and my husband and children mourn me as if I have gone. How could they think I’d ever leave them? For all the riches of heaven I would never leave them. My love keeps
me here, for it is stronger than the strongest chain, and I realize now that love is everything – it is who we are; we just don’t know it.

I approach my children and reach out my hand, but I’m made of a finer vibration, like light, and they feel nothing, not even the warmth of my love. I press my face against theirs, but they
don’t even sense that I am close, for I have no breath with which to brush their skin. They feel only their loss, and I cannot comfort them or wipe away their tears. As for
my
tears,
they are shed inwardly, for I am a spirit, a ghost, a phantom, whatever you want to call me; I have no physical body, therefore I suffer my pain in my soul. In a rage I fling myself about the
church, hoping for some reaction. I tear about like a maddened dog, but I am as a whisper and no one can hear me howl but the birds.

The strangest thing about dying is that it’s not strange at all. One moment I was living, the next I was outside my body. It felt like the most natural thing in the world to be outside of
myself, as if I had already done it a hundred times before, but forgotten. I was just surprised that it had happened so soon when I still had so much left to do. It didn’t hurt nor did it
frighten me. Not then, anyway. The pain was yet to come. What they say about the light and your loved ones who come down to escort you on is true. What they don’t tell you is that you have a
choice; and I chose to stay.

Father Michael clears his throat and sweeps his moist eyes over the grave faces of his congregation. ‘Caitlin is with God now and at peace,’ he says, and I attempt and fail to wrench
the Bible from his hand and fling it to the floor. ‘She leaves behind her husband Conor and their two young children Finbar and Ida, who she loved with a big and generous heart.’ He
looks directly at my children now and speaks with grand authority. ‘Although she is gone to Jesus she leaves a little of herself with them. The love they will carry in their hearts throughout
their lives.’ But I am more than that, I want to shout. I’m not a memory; I’m more real than you are. My love is stronger than ever and it is all I have left.

The service finishes and they file out to bury me in the churchyard. I’d like to be buried near the sailor’s wife, but instead I am laid to rest beside the stone wall a little
further down the hill. It’s farcical to watch the coffin lowered into the ground while I sit on the grass nearby, and it would be quite funny, were it not so desperately sad. Conor tosses a
white lily into the trench and my children throw down pictures they have drawn, then step back into their father’s shadow and cower against his legs, pale-faced and tearful. I am weary from
trying to get their attention. A gull hops towards me but I shoo him away, just for the pleasure of watching him react.

Time does not exist where I am. In fact, I realize now that time does not exist where you are, either. There is only ever now. Of course, on earth there is psychological time, so you can plan
tomorrow and remember yesterday, but that only exists as thought; the reality is always now. So days, weeks, years mean nothing to me. There is only an eternal present from where I watch the
disintegration of everything I love.

It is as if, with my death, the life has gone out of Ballymaldoon Castle, too. It is as if we have died together. I watch the men in big vans motor up the drive, beneath the burr oaks that crowd
in over the road to create a tunnel of orange and red, their gossamer leaves falling off the branches and fluttering on the wind like moths. On either side a low, grey stone wall once hemmed in
sheep, but there haven’t been sheep here since Conor bought the castle and surrounding land almost twenty years ago, so now the fields are wild. I like them that way. I watch the long grasses
swaying in the breeze, and from a distance they look like waves on a strange green ocean. The lorries draw up in front of the castle where Cromwell’s armies stood four hundred years ago to
seize it for an officer, as a reward for his loyalty. Now the army of burly men is here to take the valuable paintings and furniture into storage, because Conor is boarding up the windows and
bolting the doors and moving into a smaller house near the river. He has always been a solitary man; creative men often are, but now I watch him retreat even further into himself. He cannot live
here without me because I breathed the life into this place and now I am dead.

I loved the castle from the very first moment I saw it, nestled here at the foot of the mountain like a smoky quartz. I imagined its imposing grey walls once scaled by princes come to rescue
princesses imprisoned in the little tower rooms that rise above the turreted gables. I imagined how swans once glided across the lake and lovers lay on the banks in the evening sun to watch their
courtship. I imagined the three Billy Goats Gruff trotting across the ancient stone bridge, unaware of the wicked troll lurking in the shadows beneath. I imagined the ghosts of knights and ladies
haunting those long corridors carpeted in scarlet and never guessed that I would be one of them, imprisoned by the longing in my heart. I never dreamed I would die young.

I watch helplessly as most of the pieces I chose with such care are lifted and carried and piled high in the vans, supervised by our estate manager, Johnny Byrne, and his son Joe. It is as if
they are dismembering me, piece by piece, and placing my limbs into coffins all over again; but this time I’m sure I can feel it. The George VI pollard-oak library table; the parcel-gilt
mirror; the set of twenty George IV dining chairs I bought at auction from Christie’s. The marble busts, Chinese lamps, my maple writing desk. The ebony chests, the Victorian armchairs and
sofas, the German jardinières; the Regency daybed, the Indian rugs: they take them all, leaving only the pieces of no worth. Then they lift down the paintings and prints, exposing pale
squares on the denuded walls, and I cringe at how ungallant they are, as if these brawny men have robbed a lady of her clothes.

I fear they are about to remove the greatest prize of all: the portrait of myself that Conor commissioned a little after we were married, by the famous Irish painter, Darragh Kelly. It takes
pride of place above the grand fireplace in the hall. I am wearing my favourite emerald-coloured evening dress, to match my eyes, and my red hair falls in shiny waves over my shoulders. I was
beautiful, that is true. But beauty counts for nothing when it lies rotting in a casket six feet beneath the ground. I rest my eyes upon it, staring into the face that once belonged to me, but
which is now gone forever. I want to weep for the woman I was, but I cannot. And there is no point tearing about the place as I did in the chapel, for no one will hear me but the other ghosts who
surely lurk about this shadowy limbo as I do. I’m certain of it although I have not seen them yet. I would be glad of it, I think, because I am alone and lonely.

Yet they do not take it down. It is the only painting left in the castle. I cannot help but feel a surge of pride when the doors are bolted at last and I am left in peace to contemplate the
earthly beauty I once was. It gives me comfort, that painting, as if it is a costume I can slip on to feel myself once more.

Conor and the children settle into Reedmace House, which is built down by the river, near the stone bridge where the goats and troll of my imagination dwell, and Conor’s mother, Daphne,
moves in to look after them. I should be pleased the children have a kind and gentle grandmother, but I cannot help but feel jealous and resentful. She embraces them and kisses them in my place.
She bathes them and brushes their teeth as I used to do. She reads them bedtime stories. I used to mimic the voices and bring the stories to life. But she reads plainly, without my flair, and I see
the children grow bored and know they wish that she were me. I know they wish that she were me because they cry silently in their beds and stare at my photograph that Conor has hung on the wall in
their bedroom. They don’t know that I am beside them all the time. They don’t know that I will be with them always – for as long as their lives may be.

And time passes. I don’t know how long. Seasons come and go. The children get taller. Conor spends time in Dublin but there are no films to produce because he no longer has the will or the
hunger. The empty castle grows cold as the rocks on the hills, and is battered by the winds and rain. I remain constant as the plants and trees, with no one to talk to but the birds. And then one
night, in the middle of winter, Finbar sees me.

He is asleep, dreaming fitfully. I am sitting on the end of his bed as I do every night, watching his breath cause his body to rise and fall in a gentle, rhythmic motion. But tonight he is
restless. I know he is dreaming of me. ‘It’s all right, my love,’ I say, as I have said so often, silently, from my other world. ‘I’m here. I’m always here.
Right beside you.’ The little boy sits up and stares at me in amazement. He stares right at me. Not through me but at me. I’m certain of it because his eyes take in my hair, my nose, my
lips, my body. Wide with astonishment they drink me in and I am as astonished as he.

‘Mam?’ he whispers.

‘Darling boy,’ I reply.

‘Is it you?’

‘It’s me.’

‘But you’re not dead.’

I smile the smile of someone with a beautiful secret. ‘No, Finbar. I’m not dead. There is no death. I promise you that.’ And my heart lifts with the joy of seeing his face
flush with happiness.

‘Will you never leave me?’

‘I’ll never leave you, Finbar. You know I won’t. I’ll always be here. Always.’

The excitement begins to wake him and slowly he loses me. ‘Mam . . . Mam . . . are you still here?’

‘I’m still here,’ I say, but he no longer sees me.

He rubs his eyes. ‘Mam!’ His cry wakes Daphne, who comes hurrying to his side in her nightdress. Finbar is still staring at me, searching me out in the darkness.

‘Finbar!’ I exclaim. ‘Finbar. I’m still here!’ But it is no good. He has lost me.

‘It’s only a dream, Finbar,’ Daphne soothes, laying him down gently.

‘It wasn’t a dream, grandmam. It was real. Mam was on the end of my bed.’

‘You go back to sleep now, darling.’

His voice rises and his glistening eyes blink in bewilderment. ‘She was here. I know she was here.’

Daphne sighs and strokes his forehead. ‘Perhaps she was. After all, she’s an angel now, isn’t she? I imagine she’s always close, keeping an eye on you.’ But I know
she doesn’t believe it. Her words satisfy Finbar, though.

‘I think so,’ he mumbles, then closes his eyes and drifts off to sleep. Daphne watches him a while. I can feel her sadness, it is heavy like damp. Then she turns and leaves the room
and I am alone again. Only this time, hope has ignited in my heart. If he managed to see me once, he might see me again.

Ellen Trawton arrived at Shannon airport with a single suitcase, fake-fur jacket, skinny jeans and a pair of fine leather boots, which would soon prove highly unsuitable for
the wild and rugged countryside of Connemara. She had never been to Ireland before and had no memory of her mother’s sister, Peg, with whom she had arranged to stay, under the pretext of
seeking peace and solitude in order to write a novel. As a London girl, Ellen rather dreaded the countryside, considering it muddy and notoriously quiet, but her aunt’s was the only place she
knew where her mother would not come looking for her – and the only place she could stay without having to spend a great deal of money. Having quit her job in marketing for a small Chelsea
jeweller, she was in no position to be extravagant. She hoped Aunt Peg was rich and lived in a big house in a civilized part of the country, near a thriving town with shops and cafés. She
didn’t think she’d last if she lived in the middle of nowhere with only sheep to talk to.

She stepped out into the Arrivals hall and scanned the eager faces of the crowd for her aunt. Her mother was tall and still beautiful at fifty-eight, with long, mahogany-coloured hair and high
cheekbones, so Ellen assumed Aunt Peg would be similar. Her eyes settled at once on an elegant lady in a long camel-hair coat, clutching a shiny designer handbag with well-manicured hands, and her
heart swelled with relief, for a woman who lived in the middle of a bog would not be wearing such a stylish pair of court shoes and immaculate tweed trousers. She pulled her case across the floor.
‘Aunt Peg!’ she exclaimed, smiling broadly.

The woman turned and looked at her blankly. ‘Excuse me?’

‘Aunt Peg?’ But even as she said it, Ellen could tell that she had made a mistake. ‘I’m sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ For a
second she felt lost in the unfamiliar airport and her resolve weakened. She rather wished she were back home in Eaton Court, in spite of having gone to such trouble to escape.

‘Ellen!’ a voice exclaimed from behind. She swung around to see a keen, shiny face beaming excitedly up at her. ‘Just look at you! Aren’t you a picture of glamour!’
Ellen was surprised her aunt spoke with such a strong Irish accent when her mother spoke like the Queen. ‘I knew it was you the minute I saw you coming through the door. So like your
mother!’ Aunt Peg looked like a smiling egg, with short, spiky grey hair and big blue eyes that sparkled irreverently. Ellen was relieved to see her and bent down to kiss her cheek. Peg held
her in a firm grip and pressed her face to her niece’s. The woman smelt of lily of the valley and wet dog. ‘I hope you had a good flight, pet,’ she continued breathlessly,
releasing her. ‘On time, which is a boon these days. Come, let’s go to the car. Ballymaldoon is a couple of hours’ drive, so if you need to use the lav, you’d better go now.
Though of course we can stop at a petrol station on the way. Are you hungry? They probably didn’t give you much to eat on the plane. I always take sandwiches from home. I can’t bear the
cheese they put in theirs. It tastes like rubber, don’t you think?’