The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Toibin

  ‘I’ll be OK, I’m sure,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll be here most of the day tomorrow,’ he said, ‘but here’s my home number anyway, I have it written down for you. Also, it seems to me that they don’t really need to have him in hospital. He has to have a line put back in and that will be done early tomorrow morning, I imagine. But after that they probably won’t do anything else with him, just monitor him. It’s really easy to get into hospital, but really hard to convince them to let you out. If you and your mother told Louise that you wanted to take him out, even for a day, then she would listen to you.’

  ‘The main thing tomorrow is my mother,’ Helen said.

  ‘No, hold on,’ Paul said. ‘The main thing is Declan, not your mother. He gets depressed in that hospital room, so it’s not just a small detail. It’s a priority.’

  ‘Thanks for the correction,’ she said.

  She got into the car and closed the door, pulling down the window so she could still talk to him. ‘I’m really grateful to you for everything,’ she said. She tried to sound as though she meant it, regretting the hostility in her earlier tone.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said and looked away. He was about to say something and then stopped himself. He looked at her, his expression almost hostile. ‘I’ll see you,’ he said.

  She started the car and drove out of the hospital grounds and into the city centre. She found a parking space in Marlborough Street, took her briefcase from the car, put money in the meter and made her way to the reception desk of the Department of Education.

  She was early and she sat there waiting. If Hugh were here now, she knew, he would make her go home. She wished he were waiting out in the car for her and were coming to Wexford with her. He would probably be in Donegal by now, settling the boys into his mother’s house. She would phone him before she left. Her mind kept skipping as she thought about him and the boys and the meeting she was about to attend, and she found that each time she could not focus on what the trouble was, it was like a dark shadow in a dream, and then it became real and sharp – Declan, the hospital, her mother. Mosdy, when she worried or was concerned, it was about things which could be solved or would pass, but this was something new for her – and that was why, she believed, her mind kept avoiding it – something that would not go away, that could only get worse. She would do anything, she realised, to wish it away.

  When some other school principals arrived, a porter came to take them upstairs.

  ‘The Minister is here,’ the porter said, ‘and he wants to be introduced to you all before the meeting.’

  A year earlier, the Minister had come to open the new science laboratories in Helen’s school, and he had stayed afterwards for more than an hour in her office, asking questions, listening carefully.

  When Helen walked into the room, she saw a few civil servants whom she recognised, including one with whom she had constant problems. Now, because of the Minister’s imminent arrival, they were all polite and cowed. They shook hands and made small talk until the Minister came in.

  ‘The Minister says he’s met all of you at some time or another, but I’m going to introduce you all nonetheless.’ John Oakley, the most senior civil servant, spoke.

  The Minister greeted each person introduced and then politely asked them to take a seat. He remained standing.

  ‘You’re all welcome here,’ he began. ‘I know you’re busy and I know you’re going on holidays and we’re all grateful to you for coming in today. These meetings are informal. However, there will be a report at the end and John Oakley here is going to write it and it will be done by Christmas. We’ve asked you to come here specifically because each of your schools has excelled in a certain area, areas which are particularly weak in other schools. The ones which come most to mind are absenteeism, in both teachers and pupils – Helen O’Doherty here has the lowest absentee rate or sick-leave rate for pupils or teachers anywhere; European languages – Sister here has been getting extraordinary results, especially in the spoken languages, and girls doing well in physics and higher maths, and George Fitzmaurice’s school in Clonmel has excelled in that. These are just a few of the areas, and we want to know how it’s done and apply it elsewhere. If you want to submit written reports, by all means do so, but please come to a few of these informal meetings between now and Christmas. And, as I think you know, if you have any particular concerns or problems, come to me with them, either directly or through John Oakley, our door is always open. That’s all I’m going to say now. Thank you all, and I’ll leave you to it.’

  The Minister smiled at them and spoke briefly to one of the civil servants. On the way out of the room, he caught Helen’s eye.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you,’ he said. ‘I think you told me the day I was out at the school that you were from Enniscorthy and your father was a teacher too. But I heard more about you when I was down there at the Mercy Convent and the nuns said that one of their past pupils was a school principal in Dublin and that your maiden name was Breen and that your father was Michael Breen. I knew your father well. We were both on the committee, the very first one, of the Irish Branch of the Association of European Teachers.’

  ‘My father is dead twenty years,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t think you’d remember him.’

  ‘It was a great loss, Helen,’ the Minister said. ‘You know, you might be too young to remember this about him, but he was brilliant and dedicated, one of the very best. He’d be very proud of you now, Helen.’

  The Minister’s tone was so personal and confidential, so unreserved, that Helen wanted to say something else to him, talk to him more, but he squeezed her hand and moved away and was soon talking to one of the other principals.

  Helen waited until the Minister had left and then approached John Oakley.

  ‘I have to go,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay. I’ll send you in a report and I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘Even if you could stay for half an hour,’ he said.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Was it something the Minister said?’ he asked suspiciously.

  ‘I have to go to Wexford,’ she said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’

  As she walked down the corridor, she began to cry. A civil servant coming out of a doorway with a bunch of files looked at her, astonished. She walked down the stairs to the lobby and went out to the car. She sat there until she felt composed and then drove home to Ballinteer through the evening traffic.

  By seven o’clock she was on the road to Wexford. Hugh, when she phoned him, had wanted to drive back down to Dublin; the boys, he said, had already forgotten he existed, they were so taken up with their cousins and the strand and their granny’s house. He offered to get into the car immediately and come down, but Helen said no, she would go to Wexford on her own and phone him the next day.

  She told him about Seamus Fleming, and Hugh said that he remembered Seamus asking when he was going to Donegal, but he never knew he was a friend of Declan’s, he didn’t even know he was gay.

  ‘I hate the idea’, she said, ‘of him coming to the party, knowing that we didn’t know.’

  ‘Declan must have told him not to tell us,’ Hugh said.

  As she drove south, the sky began to brighten. Declan’s car was old, and she had to be careful not to overtake on these narrow roads beyond the dual carriageway. At times she felt she was driving in a dream, one of those dreams that you wake from still unsure that it is over, but she was certain now as she drove on past Rathnew towards Arklow that she was wide awake. The evening light was clear, the sky blue with white clouds banked in the distance. She had not put a single thought into what she would say to her mother. When she began to picture the time they would spend together, whether in Wexford or in Dublin, she realised she would do anything to avoid it. She began to work out options.

  She thought of booking into a hotel in Wexford and going to find her mother in the morning, but it was only when she stopped at Toss Byrne’s in Inch, on the road into Gorey, that she knew for certai
n what she would do. She would not drive to Wexford that night. Instead, she would drive to Cush on the coast, where her grandmother lived, and tell her first. She would stay the night there; her grandmother would know how her mother should be handled.

  She realised as she went into the lounge that she was starving. She had never stopped here before and, even though she had spotted the sign which said Food All Day, she was surprised to find a full-dinner menu on each table. She waited at the counter for a while, expecting to be told that the kitchen was closed, but a barman came and took her order and told her that he would bring the food down to her table. There was something typically Wexford about his accent and tone, a slightly awkward friendliness and openness which she had forgotten and which she now recognised, and it made her feel lighter as she went to the table and sat down. She had believed that nothing could lift her spirits, and now the barman’s angled smile had made her almost cheerful. She knew, however, that what had really changed her mood had been the decision to postpone meeting her mother.

  Her grandmother Dora Devereux lived alone in her former guest-house near the cliff in Cush. She was almost eighty and, except for her failing sight and fits of intense bad humour, was in good health. Helen pictured her now: her long neck and long thin face, grey hair pulled back in a bun, thick glasses, thin bony wrists, her expression alert, curious, watchful, tuned into every change in the wind or news in the neighbourhood. Helen smiled to herself as she thought about how her grandmother, in a rambling phone call a few weeks earlier, had told her about selling three sites for £15,000 each. She had done the deal without consulting Helen’s mother, she had said defiandy. Her tone was that of a conspirator, seeking Helen as an ally and friend.

  Helen had asked her grandmother if she was not getting on with her mother. Instead of replying, the old woman had gone on to remind Helen of how good she had been to Helen’s mother in the time after her father died, how she had comforted her and consoled her, had sat up with her at night, slept in the room with her. How little she had got in return, her grandmother had said. She had seemed surprised, almost affronted, when Helen did not reply.

  As Helen drove through Gorey and then turned left down the coast road, she thought to herself that with her grandmother it would somehow be easy to come like this, with bad news, looking for help. It would not be so easy to approach her mother. As she drove through Black-water, Helen found herself unable to imagine what telling her mother would be like. She realised that the bitter resentment against her mother which had clouded her life had not faded; for a long time she had hoped that she would never have to think about it again.

  When she turned at the ball-alley, she felt she was entering a new realm. For the first mile or so there were no houses, and then a new bungalow appeared on a corner just after the turn into the forest. She was overwhelmed now by sadness, a feeling which replaced the sense of foreboding and shock which had filled her. It was a feeling which she could deal with; there was no fear in it. The sudden rise in the road and then the first view of the sea glinting in the slanted summer light made it easier. The sadness brought tears to her eyes: she felt it sharply – that this would all go, that Declan would never see it again, never walk these lanes again, just as her father never would; soon they would only be a memory, and that too would fade with time.

  She passed a mud ruin where old Julia Dempsey had lived out her days, and she would have given anything then to go back to the years before their father died, when they were children here and did not know what was in store for them.

  At her grandmother’s gate she stopped the car, pulled up the handbrake and turned off the engine. Her grandmother appeared at the door, her hand shading her eyes even though she stood in shadow.

  ‘Here you are now, Helen,’ she said as Helen approached from the car.

  She had never in her life kissed her grandmother, or shaken her hand; now as she came close to her she did not know what to do.

  ‘Granny, I’m sorry for barging in on you like this.’

  ‘Oh, it’s a great surprise, Helen, it’s a lovely surprise.’

  Her grandmother searched her face and then looked back towards the gate to check that no one else was coming. She turned and walked into the house. The big old Aga cooker in the kitchen was on full, and the room was warm. As Helen came in, the two cats jumped up to the top of the dresser – their constant presence there looking down on the room had amazed Cathal and Manus the previous year – and sat there watching her suspiciously.

  ‘Now, Helen, there’s tea on and I could make you up a fry.’

  ‘No, Granny, I’ll just have tea. I had a meal on the way down.’

  She realised that her grandmother was biding her time, asking nothing, waiting to be told.

  ‘Granny, I have very bad news.’

  Her grandmother turned and put her two hands into the pockets of her apron as though searching for something. ‘I know, Helen. I knew that as soon as I saw you.’

  She remained standing as Helen told her the story. She concentrated fiercely on what was being said so that Helen felt, when she was finished, that the old woman could have repeated every single word she had said. There was something which she had forgotten: in the corner of the kitchen sat a huge television; her grandmother had access to all the English channels as well as the Irish ones. She watched documentaries and late-night films and prided herself on being well informed on modern subjects. She knew about AIDS and the search for a cure and the long illnesses. ‘There’s nothing can be done, Helen, so,’ she said. ‘Nothing can be done. It was the same years ago with your father’s cancer. There was nothing the doctors could do. And poor Declan’s only just starting his life.’

  ‘What will I do about my mother?’ Helen asked.

  ‘You’ll go into Wexford in the morning and you’ll break the news to her softly, Helen. Let her sleep tonight now. It’s the last night’s sleep she’ll have for a long time.’

  Her grandmother made tea and put biscuits on a plate. She sat down opposite Helen. It was still bright outside, and Helen felt a desperate need to go down to the strand, to get away from the intensity of her grandmother’s attention.

  ‘I’ll make you up a bed now,’ her grandmother said. ‘The room hasn’t been used since you were here last summer. Your mother never stays, and she hasn’t been here much recendy.’

  ‘Have you fallen out with her?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Ah, not really. She still thinks she’s going to get me to move into Wexford. What if I broke my leg out here, she asked me. And I told her I’ve plenty of money now that I sold the sites; that old field that was full of ragwort. I never consulted her or asked for her opinion. And that’s all is wrong with her, but she’s well over it now. She’s good at forgetting things, putting them behind her. And I had the central heating installed without as much as a by-your-leave from her. Come on until I show you.’

  She stood up and Helen accompanied her into the old dining-room. She pointed at the new white radiator, and then opened the doors of the two bedrooms off the dining-room with iron beds and bare mattresses. These two rooms also had radiators.

  ‘I had it put in all over the house, and a big oil tank out the back. I bought a deep-freeze as well, so I have no worries. Your mother came down when the work was half done and said that the house would rot. She said that she had everything set up for me in Wexford. “It’s a wonder, Lily,” I said to her, “that you don’t look high-up or low-down at me and I only ten miles out the road and you with your big car. Isn’t it funny now that you’ve started to call when you know I have money?” Oh, she was raging. That was Easter and I didn’t see her again until the end of May. She brought me down this.’ She took a mobile phone from her apron pocket. She held it in her left hand as though it were a small animal. ‘Oh, I told her I couldn’t have a phone in the house. I’d worry about it, so I keep this here, it’s turned off, I never use it.’

  ‘But, Granny, you didn’t mean it about the money.’

  �
�No, Helen, but it was the only thing I could say that would make her stop trying to move me into the town. Oh, she was raging. And she’d be even more raging if she thought I told you. God help her, she’ll have other things to think about now.’

  Her grandmother went over to the window and peered out through the curtains.

  ‘Is it easy to get down to the strand this year, Granny?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Oh yes, Helen, they dug steps and the steps have stayed, except for the last bit which is all marly and mucky.’

  ‘I’d like to go down, just for a minute, just so I can think, it’s been the longest day I’ve ever spent.’

  ‘You go down, Helen, and I’ll make up your bed, and I’d be glad if you’d drive the car into the yard or I’ll have dreams about it rolling over the cliff.’

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  The last strong rays of the sun could be seen over the hill behind the house. The air was still, with hardly a hint of the night about to fall. She felt almost healed and enclosed by her grandmother, but she knew, too, that her grandmother’s attempt to suggest that nothing could hurt her was half pretence; the other half was a hardness built up over a lifetime of expecting the worst and then watching it unfold.

  As Helen walked down the lane, she could see only the soft blue horizon and she could not imagine what the sea would look like in this light. And when she came to the edge she saw it down below: blue with eddies of dark blue and green in the distance. The sea was calm and the waves rolled over with an easy, whispering crash. There was no barrier at the end of the lane; a car could easily be driven over and would tumble down the clay and marl on to the sand below. But no strangers were expected here; even in the summer it was not a place for casual visitors.

  She found the steps and began to make her way down to the strand. The first stretch was easy, but soon she had to move carefully, holding on to weeds and tufts of grass, trying and failing to avoid the muck and the wet marl. She had to run down the last bit; it had always been like that, there was always too much loose sand at the bottom.