by Colm Toibin
The child was sitting on the rug on the living-room floor when he came back. He was playing with bricks. Niamh was in the kitchen.
“Have you had breakfast?” she asked him.
“No,” he said. “I haven’t even shaved.”
He went and sat at the table, paying no attention to the child, afraid that if he tried to lift him or talk to him he would cry. He spread out the paper and began to look through the news pages. The wind was still strong outside. After breakfast he would search the garden for a sheltered spot to put his deckchair. He looked behind and saw that the baby was creeping towards him, but as he caught the child’s eye, the boy began to scream as though he had been hit. Niamh came running from the kitchen.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He just looked at me and started to squeal,” he said.
“He’s acting strange. It must be very unsettling for him,” she said. “Mrs. Murphy is going to take him every afternoon, so I can do some work.”
“He’ll be even more unsettled up there.”
“He’s used to women.”
“A small recently-born feminist,” he said and grinned. Niamh did not smile.
* * *
After a few days watching Niamh with her son he took the view that she carried him around too much. He said nothing, but avoided the child as much as possible, and suggested to Niamh that they wait until the child went to bed before having dinner in the evening. He went back to his law books, setting up a table in the bedroom, as Niamh had set up a computer in her room, and he became absorbed once more in the intricacies of European law.
He noticed on the fourth morning that Michael had nothing to do: he had been put down on the floor while Niamh had a shower. She asked Eamon to keep an eye on him. The child crawled towards the door, checking to see if he was being followed. Eamon let him go. It was a fine, dry day. He carried out the toy bricks which were on the table and put them on the gravel in front of the house, pretending that he was paying no attention to the child. He acted absent-minded and distracted, making sure not to catch the child’s eye. He went back and sat at the window, keeping the child in view, making sure that he did not start eating the gravel. The child played with the bricks for a while and then sat doing nothing.
Eamon went into the kitchen and filled a basin with water. He found a few plastic cups in a press above the sink and put these into the water. He carried the basin out to where Michael was sitting and put it down in front of him without looking at him. He stood back and watched as Michael eyed the water suspiciously and then looked around him to see if there was anyone other than his grandfather watching. The child looked at the water again and then took up a brick and threw it into the water. He put his hand in and fished it out, and then threw it in again, this time with greater force. He was concentrating on the water, so that Eamon could watch him without worrying about the child looking up and seeing him and starting to cry. Michael now put his hand into the water and splashed, ignoring the plastic cups. The sun came out between the clouds; Eamon carried a chair from the living room into the garden, but the child did not notice him. He had become so absorbed in the water.
Niamh came out and stood at the door.
“Did you give him the water?”
“Yes; he had nothing to play with.”
“He is usually afraid of water. He hates having a bath.”
“He’s happy enough there.”
“Yes, he does look happy.”
Michael had begun to laugh and squeal as he emptied the water on to the ground with the plastic cups. He protested as Niamh held him to take off his jumpsuit. He refused to wear the white hat she had brought out for him, so she took it back inside and left him there with the water. He played a little longer with the plastic cups, then stood up and tried to empty the basin but fell back and sat down again, trying to turn the basin over from a sitting position. When a tractor passed along the lane he looked up and tried to crawl towards the gate. Then he stood up, but the gravel was too hard on his feet. Eamon went over quickly, picked him up and brought him to the gate just as the tractor was going by. He pointed at it, and tried to say “tractor”; he laughed and clapped his hands at the noise and the smoke, as the tractor went away from them up the lane. As soon as it had gone Eamon put him down again beside the water.
The following day, while Niamh was having her breakfast at the table by the window, Michael followed his grandfather into the kitchen and pointed at the basin. He looked at Eamon and tried to say something. Eamon filled the basin up with water and put it on the kitchen floor, as the day was too dull to go outside.
They watched as the child splashed the water with his two hands.
“How did you get the idea for water?” Niamh asked.
“Your mother used to do it all the time. Do you not remember? You and Donal were put sitting out in the garden with a basin of water. You used to play with it for hours. I remembered it the other day.”
“I don’t remember it at all,” she said. “I must have been too young.”
* * *
She worked after dinner most evenings; he saw very little of her, he still walked for hours during the day. He had lunch alone in Wexford a few times. In the evenings he read, watched television and had a few glasses of brandy to help him sleep. Once the child was asleep, or out of the house, Niamh’s presence was calm, unobtrusive. He noticed that she seemed to dress carefully every day, as though she was working in a city office. When the weather was warm enough she went for a swim in the early afternoon, but the autumn was slowly encroaching, and the nights were becoming cold.
Michael was still fascinated by the water, and came to associate his grandfather with the red basin. One night when he woke and was carried into the living room, he looked at his grandfather and pointed to the kitchen. He wanted his basin of water and cried when he was told that it was too late.
Every night before going to bed he and Niamh had a cup of tea together. At times Eamon found her strangely like her mother in the way she spoke and responded. Sometimes when she smiled she looked exactly like Carmel, even though her face was a different shape and her colouring was different.
“I see there’s a For Sale sign at Julia Dempsey’s,” she said one evening.
“It’s only a few fields,” he replied, “and the house. But the house is in a terrible state. I don’t know who could buy it.”
They said nothing for a while.
“Was Julia Dempsey born in that house?” Niamh broke the silence. He looked up and thought for a moment.
“No. Her aunt and uncle lived there and she came to stay with them and they left it to her.”
“She had a great collection of caps,” Niamh said. “I never saw her without a cap.” She poured more tea.
“There was a funny thing about her,” Eamon said. “She always believed that her uncle had money hidden away somewhere.”
“And did he?” Niamh asked. Her way of responding was so like Carmel’s that Eamon sat back for a moment and hesitated.
“She never gave up the idea that it was somewhere,” he went on. “She told your mother that she’d often wake in the middle of the night and think of a new place where it might be hidden.”
“And she never found anything?” she asked.
“No.” He shook his head. “I don’t think there ever was any money. But all her life she was convinced that her fortunes would change if she could only find it.”
Niamh looked at him, smiled and nodded her head.
“I never knew that about her,” she said. She was interested in the story and attentive in exactly the same way as Carmel.
* * *
A few days of Indian summer came to Cush, the temperature higher than it had been all summer. Eamon found it hard to sleep in the heat and woke at first light, feeling tired and worn, with a pain in his back and the base of his neck which became acute when he bowed his head. He tried to do exercises with his arms to loosen the muscles, but it was not enough, and
he decided he would have to swim much more to ease the pain.
At half past eight he drove into the village to get the paper. When he came back the sun was already strong over the sea. Michael was sitting up in his high chair being fed, banging his spoon against the plate and laughing. Eamon patted him on the head with the newspaper and he blinked his eyes as though afraid, and then Eamon did it again and he laughed, wanting more.
“I’d love to spend the morning down on the strand,” Niamh said. “How do you think he’d react to the sea?”
“Have you not tried him?”
“He can just play on the sand. Maybe you would carry his basin down?”
After breakfast they set out for the strand. Michael still refused to wear a hat, and when Niamh tried once more to put it on him he threw it on the ground. They carried a rug and some cushions, a flask of tea and some biscuits and a bottle of milk, in case Michael grew hungry. They also brought towels and togs.
When they came to the turn in the lane they looked over the cliff at the short strand and the sea stretching out for miles, like bright frosted glass, smooth in the strange heat of the September sun. Eamon carried their things while Niamh carried Michael part of the way and then let him down to walk when he insisted. On the strand she tried to put his hat on him again, but he refused.
As he unfolded the rug on the strand and changed into his togs, Eamon wondered which of his children had refused to wear a hat in the sun, or was it he himself. His father, he remembered, wore a straw hat. He saw it once blowing off as his father sat at a table and paper blowing as well in a sudden gust of wind. He could not remember where this was: he went through each corner of the garden in Cush in his mind, unchanged since the days when the Cullens lived there, but he could not see his father sitting at a table and the wind coming suddenly and blowing his hat off. Where had it happened?
Niamh interrupted his attempt to recall.
“Michael wants you to get him a basin of sea-water,” she said. She had taken the child’s clothes off and was rubbing him with sun-tan lotion.
He walked down to the sea with the basin and filled it. The water was warm, much warmer than he had expected. He played with Michael while Niamh went in for a swim. She did not spend long getting used to the water. Her movements were swift and decisive. Michael became absorbed in the sea-water and the sand until he turned over the basin and covered himself with water. Eamon lifted him and held him in his arms. He got a towel and dried him. Suddenly he turned when he heard Niamh’s voice shouting to them. She was urging them to come into the water.
“Your mama wants you to go into the water,” he said to Michael. “What do you think?” The child rubbed his eyes and squirmed and then smiled. He put his arms around Eamon’s neck.
Eamon knew that the water would be a shock for Michael. He stood at the edge for a while, drinking in the sun and watching Niamh as she swam out. Then he began to wade into the water, talking quietly to his grandson, as though to soothe him. He jumped as each wave came in, until Michael began to watch for waves and laugh as each one approached. Michael’s feet were in the water now and his grip had tightened around Eamon’s neck. Niamh was swimming close by, and telling them to come out further. Eamon held his grandson under the arms and lifted him high so the sun was on his back and then he dropped him into the water until his legs were wet, holding him firmly all the time. Once more he dropped him slowly, wetting him more this time, and lifted him quickly out of the water. A wave came and he held him high above it. Michael began to laugh; Eamon lifted him and ducked him down into the water and out again, but this time it was too much for him. The child gripped Eamon around the neck and tried to raise his body so that the water would not touch him. He was frightened. Eamon began to carry him slowly in towards the shore.
AFTERWORD
In the autumn of 1983, when I was editor of the Irish current affairs magazine Magill, I was approached with an idea by the journalist and feminist June Levine. It was for a story surrounding the murder of the prostitute Dolores Lynch. A friend of Dolores Lynch, Lyn Madden, was ready to give evidence against a man called John Cullen, accused of the crime. The story Lyn had to tell was deeply disturbing, a portrait of an underworld in Dublin which had been previously dealt with only in some sketchy court reports and in the tabloid press.
As editor, I became involved in the story and met regularly with June Levine. I also witnessed Lyn Madden giving evidence in the court. The case depended on the jury finding her credible. In the end, the jury believed what she said and returned with a guilty verdict.
The following week, as we were getting ready to go to press, I was informed that John Cullen, who was appealing his conviction, had won an injunction preventing us from publishing. When I contacted our lawyers, I discovered that even though his case would be heard by the Court of Criminal Appeal, a three-judge, non-jury court, it was, Cullen’s lawyers were claiming, still sub judice. When we went to the High Court to have the injunction lifted, we lost. We then appealed to the Supreme Court, who agreed to an early hearing.
While I realised that some members of the Supreme Court disliked the article, it became clear that they did not want to ban its publication. This partly came from an interest in freedom of the press, but it also arose from their belief in their own independence. If a magazine article could influence them in their consideration of points of law in a court of appeal, why were they so special? Surely they were above being influenced by a mere journalist?
The Chief Justice, in the case which became known as Cullen v. Toibin, spoke for his colleagues: “The Court of Criminal Appeal will be asked to consider pure questions of law relative to the appeal. It cannot be suggested that in considering such questions, publication of this or any number of articles in any number of periodicals would have the slightest effect on the objective consideration of legal arguments.”
I watched the judges carefully and I became interested in how the Supreme Court functioned. I realised that its systems and judgments would be fertile territory for a long, investigative article in the magazine. I worked on this article at the same time as I wrote some of my first novel, The South, in between intense bouts of production work which publishing a magazine entailed. I began to contact the Supreme Court judges as well as judges of the High Court and prominent lawyers. Some of the judges agreed to see me. Among the first I met was Brian Walsh, the most senior member of the Supreme Court who was also Chairman of the Law Reform Commission and a judge of the European Court. He was gruff at the beginning, but soon became friendly, almost warm. Walsh had a formidable mind. The more I saw him the more he reminded me of my father, who had died in 1967, and my uncle, my father’s older brother, who had both been active in the political party Fianna Fáil. I began to take an enormous interest in Walsh’s tone, the aura around him, although I knew that in my article I would only be writing about his judgments.
In Ireland at independence in 1922 a civil war was fought over matters both simple and complex. My father’s family, who had been involved in the 1916 Rebellion and the War of Independence, were on the losing side of that war. They were founding members of the Fianna Fáil party in 1926. Fianna Fáil, under Eamon de Valera, came to power in 1932 and held power most of the time until 2011. Both my father and my uncle remained faithful members of the party which managed to represent rich and poor and the spirit of the nation, all at the same time.
As I worked as a journalist, I was not a supporter of the party. I found its rhetoric old-fashioned and thought its leading members stupid or venal, or both. Since I lived in Dublin, away from Enniscorthy where I was born, and had lived in Spain, the old semi-tribal loyalties from the Irish civil war meant nothing to me. It was strange then to be reminded of them as I interviewed judges and barristers in Dublin, and to find the Fianna Fáil judges more sympathetic and indeed more intelligent than the judges whose families or whose loyalties were closer to the other side.
Over the months as I worked on the piece, the shadow of the 198
3 referendum on abortion in Ireland loomed large. In the magazine we had been vehemently opposed to the idea of the referendum itself, which would enshrine into the Constitution the legal ban on abortion. In that period you judged people by what side they were on in that debate. I knew, for example, as I sat in the chamber of one High Court judge, that he had been in favour of the referendum and may even have had a hand in drafting the wording of the amendment. A year earlier he had been for me a great demon. Now, as we spoke, I found him remarkably likeable. Such men reminded me that I was not from Dublin, that I was brought up in a conservative, deeply nationalist and patriotic household in provincial Ireland in which the Fianna Fáil party and Ireland were synonomous. I had a great deal in common with some of the judges, and slowly from my encounters with them and my reading of their judgments the idea of a novel began to emerge.
In my first novel, The South, I wrote a chapter called “The Sea” which featured a stretch of the coastal landscape of County Wexford in the southeast of Ireland where we had gone every summer as children. I was surprised by the amount of emotion writing about that place had evoked in me and surprised also by the ease with which the images came. It was clear that I could return there—to that eroding coastline with its washed grey light, to the subtle drama in the contours of the landscape and the mild good manners of the people who live there. I would put my judge in the house where we had spent every summer, the house to which we did not return after my father died. As I thought about the book, the images emerged as haunting aspects of memory and loss. The novel became a strange way of recovering them.
If The South was full of Mediterranean light and glamour, this novel I dreamed of now was filled with scarce Northern light. If The South dramatised a sense of displacement, this new novel would dramatise rootedness. The two novels were a diptych about the generation who came after Irish independence. The South dealt with Katherine Proctor, whose life was changed by the burning of her family’s house; The Heather Blazing dealt with Eamon Redmond, whose father or uncle may have been among those who came to set that very house on fire, the men whom Katherine refers to as “the locals.”