The Blackwater Lightship (9 page)

'That's what my granny said, I was to come here,' Helen said.

'Well, I'll get Jim to drive you down to Mai Byrne's. Isn't Declan down there?'

'But they're all boys down there,' Helen said. 'They'll just tease me. I can't go down there.'

'Isn't she very precocious! Isn't she a little lady!' Mrs Maher said.

For the next two hours, Helen worked with them, buttering the bread, making ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, salad sandwiches for people who would come back to the house after the removal of her father's remains.

'There'll be a big crowd tonight,' Mrs Maher said.

'And an even bigger crowd tomorrow. The whole of Fianna Fail in the county Wexford will be there.'

Mrs Maher and Mrs Morrissey talked while they worked, but Helen only half listened to them. She wondered was her father in his coffin yet, and did they open the coffin again, or was it closed now for ever? She wondered if they covered his feet, or left them bare.

As each pile of sandwiches was made, it was placed back into the greaseproof wrapping paper to keep the bread fresh. Mrs Maher held a cigarette between her lips while she worked. Each time the ash grew long, Helen watched to see if it would fall into one of the sandwiches, but she always tipped it into the sink before it fell.

Mrs Morrissey hoovered the downstairs rooms. After a while, when she knew that they were both busy, Helen slipped upstairs to her room and found the underpants, the vest and the socks and put them back into the drawers where they had been. She checked downstairs again by looking over the bannisters and, when she was sure that she would remain undisturbed, she disentangled the rest of the clothes, untying the tie and putting the shirt back on its hanger. Her mother would believe, she thought, that it had wrinkled because it had been unused there so long. As she left it on the back of the door, she tried to crease the other shirt which hung there too. She put the suit back in the wardrobe and closed the wardrobe door. She flushed the toilet before she went back downstairs. She had forgotten the tie, but she knew she would be able to deal with that later.

She carried on helping their two neighbours make the sandwiches. When they were finished, Mrs Morrissey said, she could come over to their house and have her dinner and wait for her mammy to come. It would be quiet, Mrs Morrissey said, and it was a sad day and she'd have to look after her mother.

'She must be broken-hearted,' Mrs Maher said.

Her grandmother was waiting for her in the kitchen.

'I don't think you slept, Helen,' she said.

'I lay awake for a long time, but then I slept for a while,' Helen said.

'I knew you were awake.'

Her grandmother put slices of bread into an electric toaster and then made tea.

'I lay awake,' Helen said, 'thinking about all the things that happened years ago. Maybe it was the room and the lighthouse brought it all back, and Declan being in hospital I suppose. Anyway, I went over everything, Daddy dying and us being down here.'

'That was a very hard time, Helen,' her grandmother said. She poured tea and took a boiled egg from a saucepan on the Aga. When the toast was done, she put it on a plate.

'Do you remember us coming down here in the year after he died? You mentioned it on the phone the day you rang me,' Helen asked.

'I do, Helen,' her grandmother said.

'You know, I would come out of school and Mammy would be sitting there in the car, the old red Mini, with Declan in the back, and as soon as I'd get in, she'd start up the engine without saying a word. I used to dread it. God, I used to dread it.'

'She couldn't manage, Helen, that's what it was. She couldn't get over losing him.'

'She'd drive us up to school in the morning from here, and I'd close my eyes when I came out at the end of the day and hope when I opened them that she wouldn't be there. But often she'd be waiting there again, and we'd know that she hadn't been home, she'd spent the day driving around the country or sitting in the hotel or in Murphy Flood's. I used to dread coming out of school.'

'You and Declan were all she had,' her grandmother said.

'I don't want to criticise her, Granny,' Helen said, 'we've been through all that, and I know it was hard for her, but the whole journey down and back she wouldn't speak to us. I have my own children now and I couldn't imagine doing that.'

'Helen, she was doing her best. She couldn't manage. She was very good to me when your grandfather died. I remember that you were doing your Leaving Cert. She looked after me then, even though she was back working herself.'

'When you rang me, Granny, you said she had never done anything for you.'

'Well, that was wrong, Helen,' her grandmother said.

•          •          •

Helen drove towards Wexford. The drizzle became blustery rain as she approached Curracloe. It was past ten o'clock now and her mother would, she supposed, be at work. She was glad she did not have to tell her the news at the door of her house; it would be easier to arrive at the office.

As she was having breakfast with her grandmother that morning, a memory came to her which she put out of her mind. It was something she could not mention. Now, as she reached the main road into Wexford, the wipers criss-crossing the windscreen of the car, she pictured the scene which had earlier come back to her.

It was a Sunday in the summer the year after her father died. For the previous few months, they had not travelled much to her grandmother's at Cush during the week, but had always gone on Sunday, setting out from Enniscorthy after twelve o'clock Mass. This Sunday — it might have been June or early July — she noticed that they were driving along the Osborne Road towards Drumgoole. She said nothing, but Declan, from the back of the car, asked why they were not driving the usual way.

'I think we'll go to Curracloe instead,' her mother said.

'Are we not going to Granny's?' Declan asked.

'I made sandwiches so we can have them on the strand if it stays fine.'

Curracloe had a car park, a shop, sand dunes and a long strand. It possessed, for Helen and Declan, a tinge of glamour and newness; Ballyconnigar and Cush were, on the other hand, stale and dull. There were, Declan maintained, too many country people in Cush and Ballyconnigar, whereas people from Wexford town came to Curracloe.

'And we're not going to Granny's?' Declan asked.

There was no reply. They drove to Curracloe and made their way to the strand, carrying the picnic which their mother had prepared without their knowing, a rug and their swimming gear. Helen wanted to ask her mother if their grandmother knew they were not coming to Cush, or if she was there waiting for them now, keeping the dinner hot, listening out for the sound of the car.

In Cush, in all the years, her mother had never gone into the sea for a swim. She would come down to the strand with them, and watch them bathe, and on a hot day she might change into a bathing suit, but she would never even get her feet wet. On this Sunday in Curracloe, Helen and Declan presumed that she changed into her bathing suit because it was hot. When she put on a bathing cap, Declan began to laugh. 'Your face looks all funny,' he said.

The sea was rough and few bathers went beyond the point where the waves broke. Declan always stood at the edge of the water for a while and then made his way in as though walking on glass. Helen had learned that it was easier if you didn't think about it, it was easier just to wade in and swim out, but it was still hard. Now, suddenly, as they both stood at the edge of the water, their mother walked past them, blessed herself, waded in confidently and, as soon as she was up to her waist, dived under the water. She looked up at them and waved and dived again and then emerged just as a huge wave broke. Declan ran into the water as the wave pulled back and tried to reach her, but he was knocked over by a second wave. Helen saw that he was laughing as the wave pushed him in towards the shore. She moved in his direction and caught him and held his hand.

'I want to get out to where Mammy is,' he said.

Close by was a group of children and adults standing waiting for the next wave to roll in, shouting at each other in delight and letting themselves be lifted by the high waves and pulled in towards the shore. As Helen and Declan picked themselves up, having been knocked over, their mouths full of salt water, they could see that their mother was still swimming out beyond where the waves broke. When they got her attention, she began to swim in to where they were.

'You said you couldn't swim,' Declan said.

'I haven't been in the sea for years,' she said.

For most of the afternoon, then, Helen and her mother, with Declan in between them catching their hands, stood waiting for the waves to crash. A few times, when they went back and sat on the rug, Declan was not content until they returned to the water. As soon as a wave appeared, he would shout that this was the biggest one, and when some of them turned out to be small and mild, this did not put him off. He would point to the next one, and the next one, and the next one, laughing all the time, until, finally, a huge wave came and knocked the three of them over.

As the afternoon faded, they sat on the rug and ate their sandwiches and drank tea.

'This is the best place,' Declan said. 'Can we come here every Sunday?'

'If you like,' his mother said.

Helen wanted to ask if her mother had told her grandmother that they would not be coming to Cush, but she knew, as they dressed and got ready to go back to the car, that she had not.

She wondered, as they drove into Curracloe village, would she turn towards Blackwater and call into Cush, but her mother turned left and took the road to Enniscor-thy. Declan sat in the back of the car and talked all the way back home, addressing questions and remarks to his mother. It was the first memory Helen had of what became a constant scene: Declan and his mother in deep conversation, him laughing and his mother smiling and Helen unable to keep up with them, but smiling too, enjoying Declan's jokes and comments, his good humour and his inexhaustible need for his mother's attention and approval.

She drove towards Wexford. She knew that her mother's offices were on the quays overlooking the old harbour, and she wondered if she would get parking near there. She thought she should phone Hugh — he would surely wait at home this morning until she rang — and then she would face her mother.

Two years after her father died, her mother went back to teaching, getting a job, with the help of Fianna Fail, in the local vocational school. Soon — Helen was not sure when — she began to give commercial courses in the school in the evening, until the designing of these courses to suit the needs of the students and the finding of jobs for those who took part became an obsession with her.

Then, with the arrival of computers, her mother began to talk to business groups and others about the need to computerise. She was the first in the county to include computer skills in her commercial course. And this led, eventually, to the setting up of her own computer business, -where she taught basic skills and later began to sell machines to businesses and individuals. The previous summer, her grandmother had shown Helen a full-page advertisement in the Wexford People for Wexford Computers, with quotes from clients in Waterford and Kilkenny who said that they came all the way to Wexford because the courses made using computers easy and the sales force made installation and maintenance problem-free. There was a large photograph of Helen's mother at the top of the page.

'Will you look at Lily!' her grandmother said.

•          •          •

When she had parked the car, Helen phoned Hugh and told him where she was and what she was about to do. She realised as she spoke to him that she had put no thought into what she would say to her mother, and that she would make any excuse — phone the school, move the car, have tea in White's — to postpone her visit to Wexford Computers Limited.

The boys had been up since early light, Hugh said, and had gone down to the strand with their cousins, wearing their raincoats. Everything was fine, he said, and he would come down whenever she wanted him. She told him that she would call him later in the day.

'Things are never as bad as you think they're going to be,' he said.

She was surprised when she saw the lift in the hallway of the Wexford Computers building, and surprised, too, by the lighting and tiling and paintwork, which were all modern and cool, as though from a magazine, and not like anything she expected to find on the quayfront in Wexford. A sign in the lobby told her that the showrooms were on the first floor and the reception on the second floor. She pressed the button for the second floor.

She was checking herself in the mirror, expecting to arrive into a hallway or lobby. She wondered if she would be able to find a bathroom up there and put on make-up before she saw her mother. But when the lift doors opened, she stepped into a vast room with windows looking on to both the harbour in front and the street behind, and skylights in the high-beamed ceiling, the attic having been removed. There were twenty or more people seated on chairs in the room; some of them turned to look at her, but most of them continued to face her mother, who was standing.

Her mother was in mid-sentence when she appeared. Helen found herself helpless, exposed; she could not retreat or try to find a bathroom. She moved forward until she found a chair. She noticed how beautiful and bright the room was, and how expensive-looking. Her mother kept talking, and acknowledged Helen's presence merely by moving her spectacles from her hair to her nose and peering short-sightedly in Helen's direction. A few others looked behind as her mother continued to lecture, slowly, almost absent-mindedly putting her glasses back where they had been.

'Now you must all remember', she was saying, 'that we are here for you. If your company installs a new system, or if you find that you need to expand your skills, then simply call us, just as you would call a plumber if you had a leak in the house, and we'll sort you out as quickly as possible, even if it means coming here in the evening or at the weekend. Just call us and we'll be here for you.'