The Heather Blazing

by Colm Toibin

  * * *

  He was surprised, then, when a few months after his father’s and uncle’s visit to the Four Courts there was a message for him in the Law Library to phone Carmel O’Brien and gave the number of her office in Enniscorthy. As he waited for the receptionist to put him through, he wondered why she would phone him and he felt interested and excited at the prospect of speaking to her.

  “It’s Eamon Redmond,” he said when he got through to her. “I got a message to phone you.”

  “Yes, your Aunt Margaret asked me would I phone you and leave a message. They couldn’t get through to you, and they knew I’d be in the office.”

  “What’s the trouble?” he asked.

  “Your father’s in Brownswood. He took a turn yesterday, but your Aunt Margaret said that he’s improved today.”

  “I’ll be down as soon as I can. Will you pass on that message please? I’m in the middle of a case but I’ll see what I can do to get away,” he said.

  “I’ll pass on that message. Your Aunt Margaret said that she’d ring me before five,” she said.

  “Is it serious?” he asked.

  “No, they told me to tell you that it wasn’t serious, but they just wanted you to know.”

  He could not leave the case and thus had to wait until the weekend before going home. He spoke to his Aunt Margaret several times, and she assured him that his father was merely being kept in hospital for tests and observation. When he finally arrived in Enniscorthy he felt uncomfortable as he opened the door of the empty house with his key, and then walked from room to room as though he had just returned from a long time away. He knew that he would have to come back here alone when he had seen his father, and spend the night here.

  He drove to the hospital and looked into several rooms, searching for his father. It was visiting time and visitors sitting around the beds glanced up at him expectantly and then looked away. Eventually, he found his father in the corner bed of a small ward. They had marked his throat with a bright red paint; he seemed weak as he smiled up at Eamon.

  “It’s lovely and bright here,” he said.

  His father nodded, his eyes alert.

  “Do you want anything? I didn’t know what to bring down with me.” His father pointed to the bedside table to show that he had everything he wanted.

  Eamon sat down in the chair beside the bed and they talked until visiting time was over. He told his father that he would be back the next day; his father’s head did not leave the pillow. His father smiled and Eamon remembered what the smile reminded him of: his father in his wedding picture and the solid, kindly, contented expression he wore then.

  He drove along the Wexford Road towards the town. He would call on his aunt and uncle and then go home. He dreaded the empty house. He wondered if he could call on Carmel; she had seemed friendly on the telephone. He was puzzled still by his aunt’s asking her to telephone him and wondered if it were a ploy to encourage him to contact her again. He decided to try. When he left his aunt and uncle’s house he drove to Court Street and parked his car outside her house. As he knocked on the door and waited for an answer several people passed and greeted him, and he knew that his visit would become the subject of gossip in the street. Her mother and her sister came to the door together.

  “She’s out,” her mother said. “She went out to do a message. How’s your father?”

  “He’s well enough. He’s in good form,” he said. “Will she be back?”

  “She’s only gone out for a while,” her sister said. “I’d say if you call back in half an hour she’ll be here.”

  She was there when he called back. She asked him if he wanted to come in, but he wanted to talk to her on her own.

  “Can I see you tomorrow night?” he asked.

  “All right.”

  “What time would suit you?”

  “Say half past eight?”

  “I’ll be ready then. Were you in Brownswood?”

  “I was. He seems weak enough. I’ll know more tomorrow.”

  He wondered as he sat by the fire at home if he should tell her that the state was going to abolish hanging. He had advised Charlie Haughey, the Minister for Justice, on the proposed legislation. He had, in fact, drafted a bill for him, and gone with him to a private meeting with representatives of the Gardai, who had to be consulted about any new legislation. Eamon had come up with the suggestion that the murder of a Garda should remain a capital offence. Otherwise, he knew that there would be strong opposition to the legislation from the Gardai. He liked Haughey, admired his pragmatism and his clear mind. Both men had agreed that, despite the clause about the murder of a Garda remaining a capital offence, it was unlikely that there would be any more hangings. As he turned off the lights downstairs and got ready to go to bed, Eamon decided not to tell Carmel about the meeting and the proposed reform. He had become involved because he was asked, not because he wanted to placate her.

  * * *

  Carmel had been to the hairdresser’s and put on good clothes. Eamon was nervous in the car with her. He asked her where she would like to go. She said that she wanted to get away from the town.

  “Your Aunt Margaret says that you’re going to be a senior counsel, the youngest in the Law Library,” she said.

  “In a few months,” he said.

  He drove along the cement road to Wexford; she talked about her job and her family. It was good, she said, to go out on a Saturday night, as her father was drinking heavily.

  “Saturday night is his big night,” she said. “From about four o’clock you can feel the tension as my mother watches him to see if he’s going out. Drink makes him quiet. He’s hardly able to walk when he comes in after the pubs close but he never says anything. He sits down and looks at the ground, and then my mother starts to give out to him. He never says anything much, but she attacks whatever he says, and goes on and on at him. Some of the things she has said to him I couldn’t repeat to you.”

  They went to the Talbot Hotel in Wexford and sat in the lounge having a drink before dinner.

  “Do you fancy us seeing a bit more of each other so?” he asked.

  “If you’re around, I’d love to see you,” she said.

  He asked her no other questions, but saw her again the following weekend. On Saturday nights she began to stay in his father’s house until late to avoid the trouble at home. She came to the hospital with him a few times to see his father, but there was still no sign of him getting any better.

  One Saturday night when he was about to walk her to her own house they stood in the hall. He turned and kissed her and caught a sense of her body, the life in her, and he wanted to ask her to stay with him. As he held her, without moving, he could feel his penis stiffening against her. She opened her mouth and he could feel her small wet tongue against his.

  “You won’t be involved in any more hanging cases, sure you won’t?” she asked as they walked down John Street.

  “Are you serious then, about us?” he asked.

  “Are you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  * * *

  One Friday evening he found his father asleep in the bed. He sat down and watched him, trying not to disturb him. But after a time he went over to the window, and then out to the toilet. When he came back again, he examined the chart at the bottom of his father’s bed, reading the comments for each day: poor, weak, very poor. He moved away as quickly as he could and sat by the bed again.

  A while later, his Aunt Margaret and Uncle Tom arrived; he knew by their attitude that his father was not getting better. He saw his uncle talking to one of the doctors in the corridor. His uncle looked worried. He turned and went to sit by his father’s bed once more. His aunt was kneeling by the bed, saying the Rosary. In the corridor again, he saw the doctor coming towards him, but he turned back towards the ward, pretending that he had forgotten something. Later, he telephoned the senior counsel in a pending case, and explained that he would have to be excused.

 
He noticed everything changing: they did not seem to be treating his father for anything except pain, they put a screen around the bed and restricted visitors to his immediate family. He told Carmel nothing, but realized that she knew, that everybody knew, not just in the hospital but in the town. But still he did not ask, and still no one told him.

  His Aunt Kitty came from Tullow; he watched her leaving her chair beside the bed and going into the corridor to cry. She returned and knelt with a nun who had been in school with his mother and they said the Rosary. They put a pair of special beads which had been blessed by the Pope into his father’s hands. Eamon knelt with them, but did not pray. He waited with his Aunt Kitty and the nun until it was late. He saw them whispering when they had finished the Rosary, and then they went out into the corridor while the doctor and two nurses attended to his father. He did not speak to them, but went to the toilet to wash his face.

  When he came back his aunt was crying in the corridor as she spoke to the doctor. They watched him as he approached. The nun came up to him and held his hand.

  “Eamon, a stór, we’re going to lose him. Your poor mother will be waiting for him with all her prayers. He’s after getting pneumonia and he won’t last. He won’t last the night. We’re going to send word to your uncles and aunts. He needs all our prayers now, Eamon, for his journey.”

  His eyes filled up with tears as he went to the window.

  “He didn’t know up to now,” his aunt said to the doctor in a voice loud enough for him to hear. “None of us could tell him.”

  “Is he going to die?” he asked the doctor.

  “He’s not in any pain,” the doctor said, “but I don’t think he’ll last the night.”

  He turned away crying, and moved further down the corridor away from them.

  “Eamon, you’ll have to be brave,” the nun came and held him.

  * * *

  After the funeral he went to his aunt and uncle’s house. Neighbours called and shook his hand and spoke a few words to him, some of them staying for a cup of tea or a drink. Carmel’s mother told him to sleep the night in their house if he wanted to, she had made up a bed for him. When he saw Carmel, he asked her to stay behind with him. They went into the kitchen, but more neighbours called and he had to go and accept their condolences. When it grew late he drove through the town with her, and stopped the car outside her house.

  “Do you want to come in?” she asked. “There’s a bed for you. You heard what my mother said.”

  “No, I’ll go home, or I might go back down to the other house.”

  They sat in the car without saying anything. The street was empty.

  “What about tomorrow?” he asked. “Can I see you after work?”

  “That’s fine,” she said.

  “I’ll park the car in the Railway Square, so no one will notice me. I’ve spoken to enough people. Could you come around there?”

  “That’s fine,” she said again. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  He could no longer sleep in the house. Too much of its atmosphere brought back her memory and he could not bear it. He made a bed for himself in the car and spent the day away from the house, walking, desperately trying to make himself tired so that he could sleep. He left his rucksack down on the sand and looked again, but a wave had risen and blocked his view. When he saw it now it looked like a man’s head, a diver’s head perhaps. It seemed so inert in the water, floating without moving and disappearing each time the water swelled and folded.

  It was a seal. And it was much closer to the shore than he had ever witnessed in all the year. When he was a child, the appearance of a seal would be greeted with wonder by the people on the strand in Cush. He had a vivid memory of a day in the past, a mild summer’s day and someone, a woman, standing and pointing and telling all of them who were lying down taking the sun to look, there was a seal, look how close he is. And they all stood up to see.

  Eamon was too old then to be lifted but someone hunched down and pointed out to sea and he had searched the waves and had seen nothing while the adult—who could it have been? he was sure that it was not his father—had become impatient with him for not seeing. And then he saw it out there, a small, black shape in the water: the seal’s head. The seal had come in to look at them. He’s harmless, someone said. Even then, he had felt unsure about this blubbery animal in the water, and for the next few days he felt uncomfortable swimming.

  * * *

  He left the house late in the morning and walked down to the cliff. It was a warm, sunny day, but there was also a strong wind which whistled in his ears as he turned in the lane towards the gap in the cliff just beyond Mike’s house. He paid no attention to the house as he passed. It was only when he turned to descend the cliff that a figure caught his eye. Mike was sitting in an old wooden chair beside the chimneypiece where his living room used to be. He had glasses on and was reading a newspaper. If the front wall of his house had not been missing it would have looked like an ordinary, domestic scene, but now it was strange, almost comic. Eamon did not know if Mike was aware of his presence or not. Maybe he did not want to be greeted. It would be hard to know what to say. Eamon stood there for a moment longer, giving his cousin every chance to look up from the newspaper, but Mike did not move. Eamon walked down the cliff away from him.

  He could not wait to tell Carmel what he had seen. He thought about when he would see her next as he took a few steps down, and then he realized, as a slow pain went through him, that she was dead, that he would not have a chance to tell her about the scene he had witnessed. This made him understand, more than ever, that he could not face her not being with him, that he had spent the time since she died avoiding the fact of her death. He went down to the strand and sat down in the shade. The wind was still strong and blew sand at him. He thought about it: the interval just now when he had believed that she was alive, that she was back in the house, in the garden maybe, or in the porch, reading the paper, or a novel, and he would come back in from his walk or his swim and he would tell her the news: Mike has taken to sitting in the shell of his house, with its walls open to the four winds reading the paper. But, slowly, painfully, he recognized that there would be nobody when he went back to the house.

  Two days later he was still thinking about that small episode, his lapse into believing that she was still alive, and as he walked along he tried to think about her dead, he repeated to himself that he would not see her again, that he was alone now, and she was alone too in her grave, her flesh slowly rotting until she would be unrecognizable, bones and a few remnants of hair. Carmel is dead, he whispered as he walked. Carmel is dead.

  He sat down on the sand. It was early and the sun was still low over the soft horizon. His back was sore from the previous day’s walking, but his feet were well rested. He thought that in future he would not carry the rucksack which was too heavy for his back. He wondered how he would carry the togs and towel, the raincoat and the pullover, and he let his mind wander over arrangements for the next day’s walk. He closed his eyes.

  When he stood up he noticed a tractor coming from Ballyvalden or further north, moving slowly along the shore. He walked towards Ballyconnigar, aware that soon he would have to stand aside while the tractor rolled past. He saw the scene already, visualized himself saluting the driver and the driver waving back. He wondered if the driver would be wearing a cap.

  He stood at the beach below Keating’s house and inspected the damage which the previous winter and spring—there had been bad storms in the spring—had wrought. The County Council had put more huge boulders just below the cliff in an effort to ward off the sea. He remembered when there was a road on this side of the house and a field beyond the road. He remembered the cars edging around the road in the years when the field had disappeared and the drop was sheer down to the strand. One of those Sundays in summer: a clear blue sky and a sharp sun glinting off the windscreens of Morris Minors and Morris Austins as they turned gingerly, cautious
ly into the car park. The sound of the big radio in Keating’s kitchen, blaring out reports of hurling matches and the fate of the Wexford team.

  The tractor passed him as he stood there. He turned and waved, smelling the thick smoke from the exhaust pipe which rose from the body of the engine. The driver waved back and slowed down to cross the river where it spread out into shallows as it neared the sea. Some years before with money from Europe, they had built a stone slipway for the small fishing boats, but they had not understood how vulnerable the land here was to change, how the sand levels shifted each year. Now he could see the exposed foundations of the slipway. It no longer reached the sea. It was an eyesore, he thought, and soon it would be completely useless.

  Keating’s house still hung on at the edge of the cliff. The whitewash was bright and glaring, and the building itself seemed firm and strong. Soon it would go, but they had been predicting this for years. He recalled someone showing him once how it would not be finally threatened from the side but from behind, where the hill had been. But this prediction had turned out not to be true.

  He sat on the wall, watching a herd of cows gathering against the fence in a field across the river. The air was full of flies and he had to move his hand up and down in front of his face to ward them off. There were a few caravans in the field which led to the strand and in the adjoining field which was used all year as a caravan park. There was also a modern tent pitched close to the river with a station wagon beside it. But there was no one to be seen.

  He stood up and walked back to the strand, crossing the river and making his way slowly south. Earlier, when he set out, the air had been still, there was almost no wind, but now a wind had blown up and a thin film of sand was being blown northward along the strand. He could feel the wind in his face, but it was pleasant and warm as he walked along. He tried to move with an even step.

  There were gulls and a few other solitary sea birds lurking over the waves. The sea was calm. He was hungry already, even though he had eaten a boiled egg and some toast before he left the house, but he decided to go for another hour or so without opening the sandwiches. He felt sweaty and tired but decided to have his first swim of the day later, when he had walked further along the strand. Since he began to spend each day walking he had learned how to divide up the time.