The Blackwater Lightship (24 page)

Helen did not notice her grandmother coming into the room. By the time she saw her she was already holding Lily, rocking her back and forth.

'It's a vale of tears, Lily,' she whispered to her. 'It's a vale of tears, and there's nothing we can do.'

•          •          •

The pills had no immediate effect. Between one and two in the morning Declan's pain became almost unbearable. Helen and Lily and Paul and Larry took turns sitting with him in the dark, but they could not touch him or speak to him.

After three o'clock his pain began to ease. He took a sleeping pill and a Xanax and said he would sleep until the morning now if he was lucky.

When Helen went to bed, she thought about Hugh and the boys and the words of reassurance which had come from Donegal. Cathal and Manus were all right; they did not notice her absence, they were having a good time. How would she know, she wondered as she lay there, if one or both of them was miserable and missed her, but learned to mask it and disguise it, and did not complain? Manus would know how to complain, but Cathal would not. He would say nothing, as he had said nothing on the phone that morning. She thought about Hugh and how easygoing and dependable he was, and how much she loved him and the boys loved him. For a moment, as she lay there in the night, she felt the glow of his love, and felt reassured that nothing that had happened to her was being passed on to her children. She resolved to think harder and pay more attention so that Cathal and Manus could feel secure in the world and feel none of the currents which went through her grandmother's house now every moment of the day. As she turned and tried to sleep, however, she knew that anyone who was close to her must have learned long ago to live with and manage this web of unresolved connections. She clenched her fists and swore that she would do her best to protect them.

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 — her sister Winnie told me this — 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 — 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.'

'Well, that priest would put years on you. I don't know what his name is,' Lily said.

'Start up the car,' Mrs Devereux said to Paul, 'and just drive it out. Someone will just have to give way.'

'When you get your own car, Granny, you'll learn all about giving way,' Helen said.

'Oh, I'll need a lot of practice first,' Mrs Devereux said.

When they arrived home, Declan and Larry had everything packed for them to go to the strand. Mrs Devereux, however, refused, said she hadn't been down there for years and if she went down now, she would never get back up. 'And furthermore,' she said, 'you'd never know who you'd meet down there, and you could get a pain listening to people.'

Declan appeared frail and white in a pair of shorts, sandals and a T-shirt. Lily carried a basket with a flask of tea, sandwiches and biscuits. As they turned in the lane, they heard Mrs Devereux whispering the cats' names, trying to entice them back into the house, but they did not appear.

In the previous few days, a number of boulders of mud and marl, studded with stones, had fallen on to the strand from the cliff; soon, they would disintegrate as the tide came in and washed over them. After a few days there would just be stones, until they too, or some of them, in the winter and spring, would be swept out, or buried in the sand.

Lily stood behind one of the boulders and changed into an old-fashioned swimsuit she must have found somewhere in the house. There were a few families further down the strand, but no one near them. Helen spread out a rug and Declan lay down on it, but sat up again to watch as his mother marched down the short strand, blessed herself as soon as she touched the water and swam out without a moment's hesitation.

'She's a brave woman, your mother,' Larry said.

'She met her match with Paul,' Declan said. 'Paul would put the fear of God into anyone's mother.'

'Leave me alone, everybody. That Declan fucker, saving your presence, Helen, has me awake all night.' He smiled at Declan.

'We'd tickle Paul, only Helen's here,' Declan said. 'You see a whole new Paul when you tickle him.'

'I can't think of anything I'd like more than to see Paul being tickled,' Helen said. 'But maybe we should wait until my mother comes back.'

Paul, who had already changed into his bathing togs, stood up and charged down the strand and into the sea. But he stopped as soon as he was up to his thighs in the cold water and jumped to avoid each wave. Eventually, to cheers from Larry and Declan, he swam out. Helen joined him, and as soon as she was down in the water, and almost warm as long as she kept moving, she noticed Declan, still in his shorts, paddling on the shore with Larry beside him. She knew that Declan could not swim because of the line which the doctors had put in his chest.

Later, when the sun left the strand in shadow, Larry, Paul and Declan went back to the house, leaving Helen and her mother alone. It was still warm and the sky was clear, except for a few clouds in the distance over the horizon. They lay on the rug first without speaking once they had changed from their swimsuits into their day clothes. After a while, when Helen was almost dozing, Lily began to speak.

'I don't think Declan is going to last much longer. It's funny how we've all absorbed the shock, and we're used to it now. It's a part of life. Sometimes, he looks like your father; there's something he does with his face, some way he turns.'

'Was my father thin before he died?' Helen asked.

'Not noticeably, no. Not like Declan is. But he was like Declan in that he was sitting up in bed and laughing, well, not laughing so much, but talking. And, of course, he didn't know he was so sick.'

'But you knew?'

'No, the thing was I didn't know either. They all thought they had told me, but they hadn't, none of them, and when after the operation the surgeon asked to see me, I went to his office, but he was never in, I never could find him. So I left it. And your father was different in hospital. He was like all the men around here, he didn't talk much, he left all the talking to others, but he loved company and he listened and he was never without company. So he found the hospital lonely, but it was a new world for him, and he'd notice everything and remember everybody, and when I'd come in he'd talk about everything that had happened during the night. And, of course, I was staying with my cousin Pat Bolger, and there were all sorts of comings and goings in the house, so I'd have my own news, and we'd read the paper and we'd talk. There was a man opposite said he never saw two people talking as much. And we planned everything out, what we were going to do.