The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Toibin

  ‘I’ll go and wait in the car,’ Helen said, and she walked across the Square to where Father Griffin had parked. As he left the driver’s seat, she opened the passenger’s door.

  ‘Will you be all right here?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, perfect,’ she said confidently.

  She watched him walk across the Square and go into Byrnes’ with Declan and Mrs Byrne. She knew what he was doing: he was telling Declan that his father was dead. She wondered why he was taking so long. Two passers-by saw her in the car and came over. She rolled down the window.

  ‘Are you waiting for your mammy?’ they asked.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Is she still in Dublin, the poor thing?’

  ‘Yes,’ Helen said. She was trying to sound grand, as though used to being accosted by people like this.

  ‘Well, we’re very sorry for your trouble.’

  ‘Thank you.’ She knitted her brow and rolled up the window.

  When Father Griffin came out of Byrnes’, he walked with his head down, hunched.

  ‘I’m not sure that we can leave you up there on your own,’ he said. ‘Mrs Byrne wants you to come back in.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy is very particular. Everything will have to be spick and span for her.’

  ‘But you can’t be on your own in the house.’

  ‘No; I’ll call on Mrs Russell, she’s the one who’s closest to Mummy, and she’ll come in with me.’

  She pretended that she was a Protestant girl being driven to Lymington House by this slow country priest. She knitted her brow again. Father Griffin started the car. She wondered what had happened with Declan, what he was doing now.

  ‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Father Griffin asked her.

  ‘Perfectly sure, father, Perfectly sure. I’ll go in and then I’ll call on Mrs Russell.’

  He drove along John Street and then up Davitt Avenue.

  ‘You can leave me here, father, and we’re very grateful to you.’

  He drove her to the house. She did not want him to know that she would have to climb in the kitchen window. She would have tried anything to make him drive away.

  ‘I’ll take my case from the boot,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘I left it open. It’s better to reverse back down, father, easier than trying to turn here.’

  She closed the door of the car and fetched her case and waved at him casually as she opened the garden gate. She walked around the side of the house without looking behind. She stood the case up, using it to reach the ledge of the kitchen window, and then levered herself up until she was able to kneel on the ledge. The clasp on the lock had been broken for years. She pulled the bottom part of the window up with all her strength. It opened just enough for her to lean in on to the draining board beside the sink, and edge her way into the kitchen. As soon as she stood up, she did not wait to close the window but went and opened the front door and found Father Griffin, as she expected, still sitting in his car looking at the house. With her right hand, she motioned him imperiously to go. She shut the door again and put her back to it, and closed her eyes. When she went into the front room and looked out of the window, she saw that he was already reversing the car; he was on his way. Now she had the house to herself.

  She listened: there was no sound at all. She had never noticed silence before. It was five months since she had been in this house. She looked around the room, touched the cold tiles of the fireplace, sat on one of the armchairs. She walked into the back room and opened the curtains. It was the stillness which surprised her, the emptiness. She had thought about these rooms so much in Cush, she now expected them to come to life for her, but they did nothing. She opened the back door and collected the suitcase from under the kitchen window; she came back in and closed it. She sat in the back room and thought about Mrs Byrne’s big living-room over the shop, and everybody being nice to her because her father had died, and she shivered.

  She was glad she had come back here. When she put her hand on the kitchen door handle, she had realised that her father’s hand would have touched it too, his fingerprints or the print of the palm of his hand had probably – no, definitely – been left there. His hand was dead now, lying cold in his coffin. And this house, every inch of it, had his traces imprinted on it: the chair where he sat, the cups and glasses he used must still have some trace of him, the knives and forks he touched, in all the years he would have touched every one of them. She went to the front door and touched the handle and lock that he must have touched.

  Upstairs, in her parents’ bedroom, his suits and jackets and trousers and shirts and ties lay in the wardrobe. She opened the wardrobe and touched one of the suits and it swayed on its hanger. When she pushed the hangers along, she found a pair of braces that he must not have worn for years. She ran her fingers along them and then recoiled, putting all the hangers back evenly in place.

  She went to the window and looked across the valley at the Turret Rocks and Vinegar Hill, and then down into the street, at the carefully tended front lawns bordered with flower-beds. There was no one on the street. The neighbours must have not seen her arriving or they would have come to knock on the door immediately.

  Her father’s shoes under the bed surprised her more than anything. They needed polish on the toes, and the laces on one of them were somewhat frayed. More than anything else in the room, they suggested her father’s presence rather than his absence, as though he could arrive at any moment to sit on the bed and slip them on, and lean over to tie up the laces.

  On the back of the door was her mother’s dressinggown and behind it hung two ironed white shirts. She took one of them down and held it up against her and looked in the mirror. She put her feet into his shoes, which were much too big for her. She opened the wardrobe again and found a dark grey suit. She put it on the bed and went through the ties, searching for one which was dark but not too dark, with dots or stripes. She put a few ties against the suit, as she had observed her mother do, to see if they matched, and eventually chose one with grey and white stripes on black. She opened a drawer and found a white vest and white underpants and in another drawer she found a pair of socks.

  She laid the suit full-length on the bed. She put the shirt inside the jacket and stuffed the sleeves of the shirt into its arms, and opened the buttons of the shirt and put the vest inside, and then closed up the buttons. She put the tie around her own neck, as if it were her school tie, and tied a knot in it and placed it inside the collar of her father’s shirt and tightened it. Then she put the underpants inside the trousers and laid the trousers out, tying up the buttons of the fly, and tucking the shirt into the trousers. She found the socks and put one inside each shoe and placed the shoes at the bottom of the trouser legs, but they didn’t look right.

  She went downstairs and picked a pile of books from the bookcase in the front room and brought them upstairs. She placed books on either side of the shoes, and, on realising that she needed more, she went downstairs and carried up another armful. She propped the shoes, the toes facing upwards, between the books.

  She looked at the figure on the bed and decided he needed something else. She went downstairs to the press under the stairs where the coats were kept and she found a cap hanging on a hook. She found a small pillow in her bedroom and brought it into her parents’ room. She put the pillow resting against her parents’ pillows, close to the neck of the shirt; she placed the cap over the pillow, as though her father had fallen asleep with his cap on his face. And then she stood back and watched.

  She closed the wardrobe door and the drawers, and then left the room and stood out on the landing with her eyes shut. Slowly, she walked back into the bedroom. It was the shoes that made the difference, made it seem that he was lying there asleep and she could come and lie beside him. She placed herself on her mother’s side of the bed, carefully and gingerly so as not to disturb him. She reached out and held the hand that should be there at the end of the right-hand sleeve of the jacket. Sh
e reached over and lifted the cap and kissed where his mouth should be. She snuggled up against him.

  By the time she heard them, Mrs Morrissey and Mrs Maher were already in the hall. She realised she would have to move very fast and very quiedy, but she knew that if they came upstairs now she would be caught and it would be impossible to explain. She reached for the shoes and put them on the floor, leaning over the figure she had made of her father. Without making a sound, she bundled up the suit and shirt and tie and underwear and socks. She placed the books on the floor and took the clothes and the pillow and the cap and moved slowly towards her own room, knowing that the creaking floorboards would soon alert the two women downstairs to her presence. She did not have time to smooth the bedspread or check the room.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is there someone upstairs?’ Mrs Morrissey shouted.

  Helen shoved the clothes under her own bed and sprang to attention, calling over the bannisters.

  ‘It’s me! It’s Helen!’

  ‘Helen!’ Mrs Maher shouted. ‘You’re after giving us a terrible fright. What are you doing here in the name of God? What are you doing here? You’re meant to be down in Mrs Byrne’s.’

  ‘My granny said I was to come up here,’ Helen said, and then rushed into her parents’ bedroom to check that she had left nothing important on the bed. She smoothed out the bedspread and went back to the landing and walked downstairs.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Maher said, ‘you gave us a fright.’ She had put white plastic bags full of large sliced pans on the kitchen table, and other bags on the draining board and the kitchen floor.

  ‘You shouldn’t be here on your own,’ Mrs Morrissey said. ‘If your mammy heard you were here on your own!’

  ‘That’s what my granny said, I was to come here,’ Helen said.

  ‘Well, I’ll get Jim to drive you down to Mai Byrne’s. Isn’t Declan down there?’

  ‘But they’re all boys down there,’ Helen said. ‘They’ll just tease me. I can’t go down there.’

  ‘Isn’t she very precocious! Isn’t she a little lady!’ Mrs Maher said.

  For the next two hours, Helen worked with them, buttering the bread, making ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, salad sandwiches for people who would come back to the house after the removal of her father’s remains.

  ‘There’ll be a big crowd tonight,’ Mrs Maher said. ‘And an even bigger crowd tomorrow. The whole of Fianna Fail in the county Wexford will be there.’

  Mrs Maher and Mrs Morrissey talked while they worked, but Helen only half listened to them. She wondered was her father in his coffin yet, and did they open the coffin again, or was it closed now for ever? She wondered if they covered his feet, or left them bare.

  As each pile of sandwiches was made, it was placed back into the greaseproof wrapping paper to keep the bread fresh. Mrs Maher held a cigarette between her lips while she worked. Each time the ash grew long, Helen watched to see if it would fall into one of the sandwiches, but she always tipped it into the sink before it fell.

  Mrs Morrissey hoovered the downstairs rooms. After a while, when she knew that they were both busy, Helen slipped upstairs to her room and found the underpants, the vest and the socks and put them back into the drawers where they had been. She checked downstairs again by looking over the bannisters and, when she was sure that she would remain undisturbed, she disentangled the rest of the clothes, untying the tie and putting the shirt back on its hanger. Her mother would believe, she thought, that it had wrinkled because it had been unused there so long. As she left it on the back of the door, she tried to crease the other shirt which hung there too. She put the suit back in the wardrobe and closed the wardrobe door. She flushed the toilet before she went back downstairs. She had forgotten the tie, but she knew she would be able to deal with that later.

  She carried on helping their two neighbours make the sandwiches. When they were finished, Mrs Morrissey said, she could come over to their house and have her dinner and wait for her mammy to come. It would be quiet, Mrs Morrissey said, and it was a sad day and she’d have to look after her mother.

  ‘She must be broken-hearted,’ Mrs Maher said.

  FOUR

  Her grandmother was waiting for her in the kitchen.

  ‘I don’t think you slept, Helen,’ she said.

  ‘I lay awake for a long time, but then I slept for a while,’ Helen said.

  ‘I knew you were awake.’

  Her grandmother put slices of bread into an electric toaster and then made tea.

  ‘I lay awake,’ Helen said, ‘thinking about all the things that happened years ago. Maybe it was the room and the lighthouse brought it all back, and Declan being in hospital I suppose. Anyway, I went over everything, Daddy dying and us being down here.’

  ‘That was a very hard time, Helen,’ her grandmother said. She poured tea and took a boiled egg from a saucepan on the Aga. When the toast was done, she put it on a plate.

  ‘Do you remember us coming down here in the year after he died? You mentioned it on the phone the day you rang me,’ Helen asked.

  ‘I do, Helen,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘You know, I would come out of school and Mammy would be sitting there in the car, the old red Mini, with Declan in the back, and as soon as I’d get in, she’d start up the engine without saying a word. I used to dread it. God, I used to dread it.’

  ‘She couldn’t manage, Helen, that’s what it was. She couldn’t get over losing him.’

  ‘She’d drive us up to school in the morning from here, and I’d close my eyes when I came out at the end of the day and hope when I opened them that she wouldn’t be there. But often she’d be waiting there again, and we’d know that she hadn’t been home, she’d spent the day driving around the country or sitting in the hotel or in Murphy Flood’s. I used to dread coming out of school.’

  ‘You and Declan were all she had,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘I don’t want to criticise her, Granny,’ Helen said, ‘we’ve been through all that, and I know it was hard for her, but the whole journey down and back she wouldn’t speak to us. I have my own children now and I couldn’t imagine doing that.’

  ‘Helen, she was doing her best. She couldn’t manage. She was very good to me when your grandfather died. I remember that you were doing your Leaving Cert. She looked after me then, even though she was back working herself.’

  ‘When you rang me, Granny, you said she had never done anything for you.’

  ‘Well, that was wrong, Helen,’ her grandmother said.

  Helen drove towards Wexford. The drizzle became blustery rain as she approached Curracloe. It was past ten o’clock now and her mother would, she supposed, be at work. She was glad she did not have to tell her the news at the door of her house; it would be easier to arrive at the office.

  As she was having breakfast with her grandmother that morning, a memory came to her which she put out of her mind. It was something she could not mention. Now, as she reached the main road into Wexford, the wipers criss-crossing the windscreen of the car, she pictured the scene which had earlier come back to her.

  It was a Sunday in the summer the year after her father died. For the previous few months, they had not travelled much to her grandmother’s at Cush during the week, but had always gone on Sunday, setting out from Enniscorthy after twelve o’clock Mass. This Sunday – it might have been June or early July – she noticed that they were driving along the Osborne Road towards Drumgoole. She said nothing, but Declan, from the back of the car, asked why they were not driving the usual way.

  ‘I think we’ll go to Curracloe instead,’ her mother said.

  ‘Are we not going to Granny’s?’ Declan asked.

  ‘I made sandwiches so we can have them on the strand if it stays fine.’

  Curracloe had a car park, a shop, sand dunes and a long strand. It possessed, for Helen and Declan, a tinge of glamour and newness; Ballyconnigar and Cush were, on the other hand, stale and dull. There were, Declan ma
intained, too many country people in Cush and Ballyconnigar, whereas people from Wexford town came to Curracloe.

  ‘And we’re not going to Granny’s?’ Declan asked.

  There was no reply. They drove to Curracloe and made their way to the strand, carrying the picnic which their mother had prepared without their knowing, a rug and their swimming gear. Helen wanted to ask her mother if their grandmother knew they were not coming to Cush, or if she was there waiting for them now, keeping the dinner hot, listening out for the sound of the car.

  In Cush, in all the years, her mother had never gone into the sea for a swim. She would come down to the strand with them, and watch them bathe, and on a hot day she might change into a bathing suit, but she would never even get her feet wet. On this Sunday in Curracloe, Helen and Declan presumed that she changed into her bathing suit because it was hot. When she put on a bathing cap, Declan began to laugh. ‘Your face looks all funny,’ he said.

  The sea was rough and few bathers went beyond the point where the waves broke. Declan always stood at the edge of the water for a while and then made his way in as though walking on glass. Helen had learned that it was easier if you didn’t think about it, it was easier just to wade in and swim out, but it was still hard. Now, suddenly, as they both stood at the edge of the water, their mother walked past them, blessed herself, waded in confidently and, as soon as she was up to her waist, dived under the water. She looked up at them and waved and dived again and then emerged just as a huge wave broke. Declan ran into the water as the wave pulled back and tried to reach her, but he was knocked over by a second wave. Helen saw that he was laughing as the wave pushed him in towards the shore. She moved in his direction and caught him and held his hand.

  ‘I want to get out to where Mammy is,’ he said.

  Close by was a group of children and adults standing waiting for the next wave to roll in, shouting at each other in delight and letting themselves be lifted by the high waves and pulled in towards the shore. As Helen and Declan picked themselves up, having been knocked over, their mouths full of salt water, they could see that their mother was still swimming out beyond where the waves broke. When they got her attention, she began to swim in to where they were.