The Heather Blazing

by Colm Toibin

  He changed into his togs as his father swam further out. He felt sweaty in the heat and noticed when he lay out flat on the sand again that the sand was sticking to his skin. He stood up and walked down towards the sea. He knew it would be cold, but with the warm sun on his back it was not as bad as he expected. His father was waving to him and swimming in a dog-paddle stroke back towards the shore. Eamon moved out until he, too, had to jump to avoid the waves. The water was cold. He wondered how you could get the courage to dive in: what would those first moments be like? His father was beckoning him to come out further.

  “It’s too cold,” he shouted and made as though to shiver.

  “Come on,” his father shouted and moved faster towards him.

  “Don’t splash me,” he said.

  His father came and put his cold hands on his back. He squirmed.

  “It’s easy, come on,” his father said.

  He felt wet now and he shivered as he stood up to his thighs in the water.

  “I’ll give you a piggy-back,” his father said.

  “You’re too wet,” he said.

  “Come on.” His father stood in front of him and stooped. He put his arms around his father’s neck and as his father stood up he let him hold the soles of his feet.

  “You’re heavy,” his father said, as he waded out slowly. Eamon was above the level of the water, but his father was moving straight out from the shore until he was up to his waist in water.

  “Don’t throw me in,” he said.

  “No, you can jump in,” his father moved further out into the deep and hoisted him up even higher on his back.

  “Let go my neck,” he said, but Eamon held on as a wave broke right over them. He was now completely wet.

  “Let go my neck,” his father said again. Eamon waited for a moment and then jumped as best he could into the water. He had forgotten to close his mouth, which was full of brine when he surfaced. He was out of his depth now, but able to keep himself up in the water without his father’s help. When his father turned and floated, he floated too, with his head right back in the water, his body relaxed, but enough air in his lungs to keep him from sinking.

  His father swam out, while Eamon moved in towards the shore and practised his strokes. When his father came out they went for a run to dry out in the sun. Eamon brought his towel and put it around him on the way back.

  “A swim twice a day from now on,” his father said. “I’ll have the papers finished by Friday. I’ll take them to Dublin on Monday.”

  “I’ll be swimming on my own so. The Cullens are too busy. They don’t like swimming.”

  “I’ll be back on Tuesday,” his father said. He dressed himself and sat down again, his hands once more clasped around his knees as he stared out to sea.

  “It’s a great country when the weather’s like this,” his father said.

  Soon, they walked up to the cliff, each helping the other, Eamon taking his father’s sandals when he needed both his hands to pull himself up. They were hungry now, and they knew that their dinner would be on the table for them when they got back to Cullens’ house.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  He sat drinking coffee, watching from the porch window as the sky became a clearer blue. The swim that day in the past, his arms around his father’s neck, the texture of his father’s wet skin and the thrill of the water were still with him. Clear and sharp memory of hot days in summer when they came to this house as visitors. Some of it more real and vivid and focused than anything that had happened since. It was not yet ten o’clock and this would be the fourth day in a row of pure sunshine, a miracle after the days of wind and rain. The sky was white and hazy at the edges and the sun hot in the middle of the day with the garden full of bees and grasshoppers. Hardly anything had changed in all the years; the nettles grew high in the rain and sunshine, the pink flower of the wild rose settled against the trellis as it had done ever since he remembered. If he let his mind wander he could see his father’s shadow correcting examination papers at the table in the corner of the garden, and the sudden gust of wind and the papers blowing as the rain began and the blotched writing becoming indecipherable. The long evenings in the house in the days before he and Carmel made the windows larger and put on a slate roof. The people moving as shadows; the cards on the table; the slow gestures as Mrs. Cullen went over to the wall and lit the lamp; the room lighting up.

  He stood and walked into the bedroom and put on his togs and then his dressing-gown and a pair of sandals. He stood at the front door for a few moments and took in the sun. Carmel was in the garden. Once outside, he noticed that the air was brisk; it would take another hour or two for the day to become really warm. He took a towel which had been drying on a bush and walked down towards the cliff, hoping that he would meet no one. Some of the locals were working on a field of hay over the brow of the hill; the fields bordering the cliff had already been cut, and a green-tinged stubble had been left behind.

  There was no wind, but there was still a faint dew on the grass. He put the towel down on the edge of the cliff and sat down. The sea was a light green with patches of a darker green and further out patches of blue. He watched the waves as they rolled in and quietly broke near the shore.

  He made his way down to the strand where it was warmer, more sheltered. He took off his sandals and dressing-gown and walked towards the water shivering as he put his feet into the cold sea. Maybe he should have waited. He stood there for a while before walking back to where his things lay. It was peaceful; he listened for the sound of the combine-harvester at work, but it was too distant, or else they had stopped working. He put his hands behind his head and turned his head around from side to side as though he was doing exercises to relieve the tension in his neck. He did it until he was tired and hot. Now, he could try the sea again. He walked down, determined not to stop even to test the water. He waded in, ignoring the splash from an oncoming wave, then stopped and dived in, swimming out as fast as he could, letting the shock of cold run through him. He lay back in the water and looked down the coast, noticing how sharp and clear everything now was in the early light. He tried not to think about the cold.

  Carmel was still working in the garden when he came back to the house.

  “The postman’s been,” she said as she stood up, a small shovel still in her hand. “He’s that small friendly man. He hasn’t been here for a while. He had a big package for you which I had him leave on the table. He wants to talk to you about becoming permanent. He asked me about it last year too, one day when you weren’t here. He says he’s done the Irish exam but they still won’t make him permanent.”

  “Does he think I run the Post Office?” he asked.

  “He thinks that you have pull,” she said.

  The envelope had a government stamp. It contained the previous year’s Law Reports in booklet form. His own judgment on the health case should be in one of them. He checked through to make sure it was there, and came across several other judgments he had made during the year. He went into the bedroom and dressed himself, and then took a deckchair and a small table into the garden and began going through the Law Reports. After a while, as he read, he realized that he wanted to mark certain passages so he went inside and found a biro. He became engrossed in what he read, and he left notes, interjections, exclamation marks and question marks in the margin with the biro.

  It was difficult, particularly in the Supreme Court judgments, but also in some of the High Court rulings, not to see the personal politics coming through even in the most balanced decisions. He enjoyed the signs of this and derived particular pleasure from the more subtle and half-disguised manifestations of it.

  He put the reports aside when Carmel came out with tea on a tray. She unfolded another deckchair and sat down beside him.

  “I shouldn’t be reading these now,” he said. “I should save them up for when it rains.”

  “Was the water warm?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “It was an ordeal.
” He put his hands behind his head and laughed. “But I feel good after it.”

  “It’s funny about the postman. I think he thinks that you can have him made permanent.”

  Carmel read a novel while he lay back and did nothing. But the lure of the reports was too great and after a while he found himself curious about some judgments which he had not followed closely at the time when they were made. He began to look through the booklets again. The morning slipped away.

  He became involved in the intricacies of the law, reading as avidly as though the papers were full of easy gossip. He was interested in the workings of his colleagues’ minds, their strategies, the words they chose. A few times he was disappointed by the arguments which were not followed through, by the vague assertions and the weak grasp of case law. There were several judgments which he read after lunch, written by his younger colleagues on the High Court, judgments he could not have written himself, since they were so detailed and all-embracing in their knowledge of technical matters such as patents, copyright and the intricacies of tort and property rights. He was more interested, however, in broader questions, in the cases which could raise much larger issues than the mere right and wrong of the arguments presented to the court.

  During the afternoon the sun disappeared behind the house and the front garden was left in shadow. He fell asleep for a while and when he woke up he saw that Carmel must have folded away her deckchair and gone inside. He still felt the excitement of the Law Reports, and regretted that he had read so much in one sitting and not left more for the days to come. He folded his deckchair too and left it resting against the wall of the house. He found Carmel in the kitchen.

  “I’m thinking of going into the town,” he said. “I’ll drop in on Aunt Margaret, but I won’t be too long.” He went out through the house to the car which was parked in the lane.

  The land looked good in the warm light of the summer evening. The hedges were thick with growth and the trees were in full leaf. As he drove towards the Ballagh he noticed the gradual appearance of bigger fields, better land, beech and oak trees. He noticed, too, the presence of big old solid houses surrounded by stone walls. A few miles later, however, the land deteriorated once more: there were no crops grown here, none of the wheat or barley which the better land yielded, only cattle and sheep. There were no big houses either, just small vested cottages at the side of the road.

  It was the first time he had driven into the town this summer. But as he drove into Templeshannon he felt that he had always been here; the sudden clarity of his recognition made the rest of the world strange and unfamiliar. There had been changes: Bennett’s Hotel was gone and Roche’s Malting had several big tin lungs beside the old stone warehouses. He passed the Post Office and turned up Friary Hill, surprised for the moment at how narrow it was, how small the houses were.

  He pulled up outside his grandfather’s old house where his father had been born. His Aunt Margaret still lived here. She was in her eighties now—eighty-five maybe, eighty-six, he wasn’t sure—but her mind was still perfect, or so Carmel told him. Carmel was in constant touch with Margaret.

  He could see her sitting with her back to the bay window as he opened the garden gate. She was reading a newspaper, holding the print close up to her face. When he tried the doorbell there was no response. He did not want to tap the window in case it frightened her. He banged the knocker for a while and then he heard her coming. She opened the door, peered at him for a moment and then took off her glasses and looked again.

  “Come in, come in, come in,” she said.

  She led him into the bright front room and fussed for a moment over the cushions on a chair. He noticed a bandage around her leg.

  “It’s lovely to see you now,” she said. “Carmel has been in a few times. She said that you would be in one of these days, but I thought you might wait until the weather got bad again.”

  “It’s lovely, isn’t it, the weather, and the house and the garden look lovely as well,” he said.

  “It’s nice in the summer,” she said.

  She smiled at him as though he was a small boy, arriving with his father to see her, proud of some new piece of knowledge he had acquired or some new achievement. She was always gentle, eager to please and prepared to disguise her own keen intelligence and sharp memory if these were to interfere with the general harmony. She had never married, never known the control a wife and mother exercises, the unsimple compromises a man and a woman make with each other. She had worked in an office all of her life, grateful for a secure job, having lived through times when there were few secure jobs to be had.

  She went down to the kitchen now and came back with a bottle of whiskey on a tray with a glass and a jug of water. He noticed that she was unsteady on her feet. She left the tray down on the coffee table in front of him.

  For him there had always been something childlike and sweet about her. She had come through, unseathed, into old age. She was free of them all now. She had told Carmel that she was happy not to have anyone to look after, even though she missed them, especially her brother Tom, with whom she had shared this house after their parents’ death.

  “You know yourself how much whiskey you want,” she said. “There’s no point in me pouring it for you.”

  “Will you not have one yourself?” he asked.

  “Maybe I will,” she said and laughed. “You know I normally don’t.” She went down to the kitchen again and returned with an empty glass and a bottle of lemonade.

  “You’ll go home and tell Carmel now that I’ve taken to the drink,” she laughed again.

  “Carmel would be delighted to hear that you’re taking a drink,” he said. She poured the whiskey and added some lemonade.

  “Let me see if I’ve any news for you now,” she said. “You couldn’t come all this way without some news.”

  Slowly, as he sipped his whiskey, she went through all his relatives one by one, distant cousins in North Wexford who were always asking for him, other cousins in America, old family friends in Cork. She talked about the Bridge Club, remembering if he had ever met any of the people she was telling him about, or if she had told him of them before.

  “I’ve a lot to tell you now,” she said. “It’s so long since I’ve seen you. I hear everything about you from Carmel.”

  There was a great deal he wanted to know, of which he only possessed snatches now, things which would disappear with her death. At times he felt that he had been there, close by, when his grandfather was evicted, and that he had known his father’s Uncle Michael, the old Fenian, who was too sick to be interned after 1916. Or that he had been in the bedroom, the room above where they were now, when his grandfather had come back to the house on Easter Monday 1916 and sat watching him as he pulled up the floorboards under which he had hidden a number of rifles. Or that he had witnessed his grandfather being taken from the house at the end of the Easter Rising. These were things which lived with him, but he could only imagine them.

  Some of these events were so close, they had been recounted and gone over so much. He realized that he would never fully know what went on, there were too many details left out. Margaret would volunteer memories or incidents, but if she was asked too much her eyes would soften and the look on her face become vague.

  “I’m not looking forward to the winter,” she said, and she started to explain how her house had been under a sort of siege the previous winter. When she turned on the light in the kitchen at the back of the house, she said, somebody would throw a stone through the window from the sloping field behind. Young lads from the town, she said, waited there for hours. One of the stones had hit her on the leg and terrified her. So she couldn’t use the kitchen after dark, she kept an electric kettle in the living room and made tea there.

  “Did you not ring the Guards?” he asked.

  “I rang the Guards, I rang Corrigan who owns the field, I even rang the Manse, and they were all full of sympathy. Father Doyle came down to see me, but no one did any
thing. I meant to tell Carmel about it, but I couldn’t bring myself to say anything. It’s very hard. No one would believe me when I said that they must have waited for two or three hours every night with stones. Waiting for me. I could feel them out there. I hope they find something else to do this winter. It’s the last thing you expect that your own would turn on you.”

  She stopped and looked into the distance. The silence lasted between them for a few moments as he wondered what he could do to help her. He even found himself wondering if what she said was true.

  “I’ll go and see the Guards about that,” he said.

  “We used to do it ourselves, you know,” she continued. “But we thought it was harmless. Knocking on doors and running away, that’s what it was then, that’s how we used to torment the neighbours. You’d give the door a big bang and then go and hide. There was a man up the Irish Street, a Mr. Metcalfe, a Protestant man, he used to go mad at us, he’d chase us up to the Market Square. I suppose that sort of thing is old-fashioned now. Your father used to love it, and Tom.”

  She offered him a second glass of whiskey, but he told her that he was driving.

  “You’d better not then,” she said, “although they’d never stop you.”

  “Do you ever think of them,” he asked, looking up at her, “my father and Tom?”

  “Think of them?” she asked. “I do all right, I do.” Her tone was factual and melancholy. He let the silence continue between them, sorry now that he had asked the question, that he had not let her talk of her own accord. She was thinking, a troubled look appeared on her face. He wished that he could ask her another question.

  “Are you playing any golf at all?” she asked him.

  “I grew tired of it,” he said, “and tired of the club.”

  “They’re terrible snobs, all those golf people,” she said.