by Colm Toibin
They both assented.
“Are the other two guilty of illegal possession of weapons?”
Once more, they both said yes.
“Could you suggest sentencing?” He turned to them both.
“Six and four,” the district justice said.
“Seven and four,” the younger man said, “with other sentences to run concurrently.”
“You can take that as read,” he said to them both. “I’m in favour of six and four as well. Can we agree on that?”
After the sentencing they waited in the back room as the prisoners were put in the van to be driven to Portlaoise prison. Usually, there were protesters, or well-wishers, or cameras outside the court, and it was important for the judges not to appear until the tumult in the street had died down. The judges did not speak until the younger man asked the other two if they were going on holidays now that the law term had ended. Neither of them seemed anxious to reply and both, when they spoke, remained noncommital.
* * *
The Garda car drove him back to the Four Courts; there were several phone messages for him, but none was important. He went back to the window and looked out at the traffic on the quays, which was heavier now than it had been in the morning, and would not ease off until five or six o’clock. He could not decide whether to leave now or wait. He had packed nothing, but that would be easy; some clothes and books, some food from the fridge. He stood at the window, letting the time go by, wondering what to do.
Carmel had died in the winter. He still found the two or three hours before sleep almost unbearable, and he did not know if they would be easier in Cush, or much harder. He would have to go there to know and he had not been there since she died. He could imagine himself in the morning, waking in the early light, listening to the radio, making tea and letting it draw on the table in the living room, scrambling eggs and making toast. The morning seemed easy. But the coming down of the summer’s night and the few hours of darkness before sleep; he was not sure that he would be ready for it.
In the weeks after Carmel’s death it was easier, there were people in the house and when they left him alone there was a silence and a solitude which he needed. He could go back over everything: how tired and distant and only half aware of his presence she was in the last weeks in hospital. He had presumed that this was caused by the drugs they were using. He let himself believe that she was getting better until he came face to face with the consultant in the corridor.
“How do you think things are going?” he asked.
“I’m afraid she’s sinking,” he said. “There’s very little we can do for her.”
He sat by her side, going out into the corridor only when the nurses asked him to, but otherwise waiting there with her, talking to her when he felt that she understood and leaving the children alone with her when he thought that they needed to say goodbye to her. Her sisters came and prayed beside the bed and his Aunt Margaret phoned to say that she was praying all the time. He did not pray, nor did the children, but he liked the rhythms of the prayers and he hoped that the sound comforted her. He held her hand when he knew that she would not last the night, and he hoped that his hand comforted her as well. He whispered to her, said her name, and went outside and stared through the heavy glass at the murky yellow lights of the road, and realized what this meant, and was struck by the terrible knowledge that she was going to go.
* * *
They travelled in a black limousine behind the hearse to Enniscorthy where she was buried. Her sisters started the Rosary in the car, but he stopped them and suggested that each person should pray silently. He knew that they resented this, but he did not want Donal and Niamh to be disturbed. Niamh held his hand at the grave and Donal stayed close to him. Her first night in the ground was unbearable for him to contemplate. She was still whole, complete, her body intact. She might have easily lasted a few more days and be still alive in the world.
They went back to Dublin after the funeral. All three of them felt apart from the rest—city people. They did not speak in the car, but there was no tension between them. Eamon felt that they were trying to support him and help him. The car dropped them in Ranelagh. They both came into the house with him. Donal lit a fire and Niamh put a stew, which a neighbour had made, into the microwave. She set the table.
He felt a bond with his children for the first time in his life, and they both said that they would come to Cush during the holidays and stay with him. Niamh’s son, Michael, was more than a year old. He made strange very easily, Niamh said, so it was difficult to get minders for him.
“He knows me from last year,” Eamon said to her.
“I don’t think he saw much of you,” she replied.
He tried to check back from bank statements how much money Carmel had given Niamh over the previous year, but he was not sure that his calculations were correct. It seemed much less than he imagined. She told him that she no longer needed the money, but seemed grateful when he offered to help her to buy a house.
* * *
He stood at the window of his room in the Four Courts, dreaming, remembering things, waiting for time to pass, watching the currents in the river. He turned and put some books into a briefcase, and looked around to make sure that everything important was locked away. Then he took his keys and left, locking the door behind him. The building was almost empty; he greeted one of the cleaning women as he passed, and she recognized him and smiled. He saw no one else as he walked through the Four Courts to the car park.
CHAPTER TWO
He remembered being called out of the Law Library one afternoon and finding his father and his uncle standing in the Round Hall. He had never thought of them as countrymen, but now, in this building which was strange for them, they seemed hesitant and shy, out of place. It was hard to explain to them that even though he had a case coming up he would not be speaking, as the senior counsels would be the only ones to address the court. In fact, he would probably be running in and out to get books for them. He was about to say that his role in the case would be merely that of a messenger boy, but he was afraid that they would misunderstand. They were beginning to look around them as though they had a stake in the Four Courts and in him, an important figure in the system.
A great number of the other barristers were from Fine Gael families. Although he worked with them, and knew many of them from university, he did not feel familiar enough with them to introduce his father and uncle. It would be considered wrong at this time of the day in the Round Hall to introduce visiting relatives to a senior counsel.
His father and uncle looked both eager and out of place. They had already spoken to several of the porters in search of him and had established that one of the older porters was from North Wexford, and this made them feel more at home, although they did not know the man or his family.
The porter knew Eamon as one of the busiest junior counsels in the Four Courts. After the Fianna Fail victory in 1957 he had regular work for the state, and became an experienced prosecutor. Several senior counsel and solicitors used him whenever he was available, but most of his work came from the state. He was making enough money now to have a car and a flat in Hume Street, near St. Stephen’s Green. He continued to be involved with Fianna Fail, working as a speech writer and campaign organizer in the 1959 presidential election and in the general elections of 1961.
As he sat behind his senior colleagues in the court, he was aware of the two men at the back of the court watching him. He would have little to do in the case, and most of his argument would be technical anyway. One of his colleagues was in Fianna Fail as well, but he was not sure that he could ask him to come and meet his father and uncle when the case was finished. He hoped that they would not feel insulted, or let down by his not introducing them to his colleagues. He found it hard to concentrate as the case went on.
After the case, he walked up the quays with them, but by the time they reached the Ormond Hotel his father was too tired to go any further. His father seemed old and worn down by
his bad leg and impaired voice. Eamon had left the car at home, since he enjoyed the walk to the courts in the morning. As they sat in the lounge of the hotel and ordered tea, he wondered how his father would get to Westland Row for the train. He felt that they would insist on not taking a taxi.
“That was only a minor case today,” he said.
“You’d need a good murder case,” his uncle said. “I’d say the courts would fill up then all right. There used to be some great murder cases.”
“They give you one piece of advice when you start on a murder case,” Eamon said, and noticed the two men listening to him as though he were an expert.
“Never look at the accused, even if you’re questioning him. Never even glance at him; that’s what they all tell you.”
“Why’s that?” his uncle asked. They were listening with great attention.
“Because if they hang him, you don’t want to have any picture of him in your mind, you don’t want to be able to remember his face. That’s what they say, anyway.”
Later, when they had gone, the story he had told them about hanging stayed with him. He had only ever prosecuted two murder cases, and in only one of which was the man hanged. At the time, he went to Enniscorthy every weekend and spent Saturday afternoon and evening with Carmel, going for a walk down the Prom with her if the weather was fine enough, sometimes crossing the railway tracks to the Ringwood. He did not talk about work much, nor about Dublin, but this time that it was the week before a man was due to be hanged. He knew the man’s name but he tried not to let it into his mind. Some people were expecting the Pope to appeal to the government for clemency. He remembered that it was a fine evening and they were walking on the cement path past the hand-ball alley and the river was calm like soft glass. She was talking about the murder case, and hoping that the man would be reprieved.
“I was involved in that case,” he said.
“And you couldn’t get him off?”
“No, I was on the other side.”
“What side?”
“The prosecution side.”
“You mean that you were on the side which wanted the man hanged.”
“I was doing my job,” he said.
She stopped and looked down the river towards the sprawling red-brick mental hospital.
“I remember a good many years ago a man was going to be hanged. It was going to happen at nine o’clock in the morning. My mother made us all say a prayer at nine o’clock exactly, the moment we thought they would hang him. I’ll never forget it. And how will you feel if they hang him?”
“I’ll feel the same as everybody else.”
“Surely you’ll feel worse,” she said.
“How would you feel if someone belonging to you had been murdered by him and raped as well?”
“I wouldn’t want them to hang him.”
They walked to where the promenade ended and turned without going up on the railway track.
“I do a lot of prosecution work now,” he said. “I’m just starting.”
“Are you getting the work from Fianna Fail?” she asked.
“I get the work through the courts like everyone else,” he said.
He walked back to her house with her. At the top of Friary Hill she asked him if he believed that the man would hang, and he said he did.
“Isn’t that terrible?” she said. “Isn’t that terrible?”
“What are you doing later on?” he asked her when they reached the door of the house.
“I think I’ll stay in tonight,” she said.
* * *
He drove back to Dublin the next day without seeing her. He thought of leaving a note but he could not think what to say. The day before the hanging he stood around the Law Library with a few colleagues as they listened to the barrister who had worked for the defence. He had seen the condemned man that morning.
“He still doesn’t believe it. He asked me how long he’d have to serve if they commuted it. I didn’t know what to say. He thinks the Pope is going to make a last-minute appeal for clemency. I should have let the solicitor go on his own.”
Eamon listened to the evening news on the radio. There was a vigil outside Mountjoy jail; people were going to say the Rosary all night. There were calls to the President to commute the sentence on the advice of the government, but the news in the Law Library was that there would be no change, the Cabinet had made up its mind. There were good reasons, he was told, for letting it go ahead.
In the morning, he listened to the eight o’clock news. There was still a crowd outside the jail. He knew that Carmel would be listening to the radio, and once she heard the morning news, she would know that there was no chance of the sentence being commuted. He went out and walked in St. Stephen’s Green. He did not want to hear the nine o’clock news.
He did not go to Enniscorthy for a few weekends; he had an important case for which he needed to do detailed and meticulous study. He wrote Carmel a note, saying he would be home soon, but he received no reply. When he drove to Enniscorthy he knew that it would not be easy to talk to her again without discussing the hanging. She did not forget about things easily. He sat with his father in the front room, looking nervously out the window, all the time commenting on the neighbours.
“Are you going out tonight?” his father asked.
“I probably will,” he said.
He had a bath and put on a clean shirt and a tie. His father was listening to the radio in the back room as he went out. It was a fine evening. As he passed he looked at each house in John Street and Court Street, each door painted a different colour, some windows clean and shiny with lace curtains, others with grime at the edges, in need of paint. Some of the houses in Court Street were bigger than the rest, with larger windows and potted plants in brass bowls on the windowsills inside. One house had no lace curtains, you could see right in; the new three-piece suite, the thick grey and red carpet, the lamps and the ornaments on the mantelpiece. Everybody looked in as they passed; the room was always perfectly neat, a showcase. The family had made money in England.
When he knocked on the door of Carmel’s house he could hear voices inside, but they quietened as Carmel’s sister came to the door.
“Is Carmel here?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I don’t know where she is. She went out earlier on. I don’t know when she’ll be back.” It sounded like a speech she had learned off by heart and when he looked at her, she looked away.
“You don’t know where I’d find her?” he asked.
“No,” she said, and sounded even less convincing this time. “I don’t know where she went.”
He knew she was in the house and he stood at the door wondering what he should do.
“Tell her I’ll be at eleven o’clock Mass tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll tell her that,” her sister said.
He sat at the back of the Cathedral the following morning but he did not see her, and he waited in his seat, watching out for her, as the crowd slowly left the church. He waited there until most of the congregation had gone out. He wondered as he genuflected if she would be in the ground of the church, but he knew that she had not turned up. He walked home along the Back Road and turned down the Tanyard Lane into Court Street. He was tempted to knock on the door of her house and ask for her; even when he had passed he considered turning back, but in the end he continued walking along John Street towards home to have Sunday lunch with his father.
He did not see her until late in the summer when he was staying for a few days with his father and the Cullens at Cush. It was a warm, mild Sunday. He had been at late Mass with his father, after which they had gone for a drink to Mrs. Davis’s pub, now run by her nephew. As he started the car in the village he noticed a group of girls going by on bicycles and spotted Carmel among them. They turned left at the bridge in Blackwater. He drove past them, and glanced in the mirror as they got off the bicycles to walk up the steep hill which led to Ballyconnigar.
In the afterno
on he had a swim. When he had dried himself he changed into his trousers and shirt, leaving his shoes and pullover with his towel and togs near a marl boulder, and walked along the strand towards Ballyconnigar.
He could see a group of girls sitting on the grass bank across the river as soon as he turned the corner. He was walking in his bare feet in the shallows, and had to roll up the bottoms of his trousers to cross the river. There were a number of groups sitting on rugs in the fields in front of Keating’s house, or further along the strand, but he was sure that Carmel’s group was on the bank. When he came level with them he stood still and looked up towards her with his hand on his forehead shading his eyes. He knew that they all saw him, he began to move up the strand, slowly approaching them, but stopping halfway to roll down the bottoms of his trousers. When he stood up he could see that Carmel was making her way slowly towards him, wearing a summer dress. He stood and watched her approach.
“I saw you in Blackwater,” he said. “I thought that you might be over here.”
“Are you in Cush?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m staying in Cullen’s with my father.”
Neither of them spoke, until it became awkward.
“I should go back up,” she said. “We’ll probably go back soon. You forget how many hills there are until you come down on your bicycle.” She smiled.
“I could drive you in later on,” he said. “We could tie the bicycle on to the boot.”
“No,” she said. “I should go back with them. We came all the way down together.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t mind,” he said.
“No, I’d rather not,” she said.
“That’s very disappointing,” he said. He could see that she was anxious to go back to her friends. “Are you sure?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. “I’d really prefer to take the road home with the others.”
“I’ll see you sometime, then,” he said, and turned back towards home. He wondered what she would say to the others, but was sure that she would not say much. When he had walked a certain length, he sat down in the shadow of the cliff and looked out at the sea. He did not think that he would see her for a long time.