The Blackwater Lightship

by Colm Toibin

  Paul was sitting at the kitchen table.

  ‘I have a few books out in the car. I’ll show them to you if you want, but everything Declan is saying is true.’

  ‘He’s as calm,’ his grandmother said. ‘Look at him. I’d be tearing my hair out.’

  ‘I’ve done all that,’ Declan said. ‘And I’m not calm. I only look calm.’

  ‘There’s a good eye man in Waterford,’ his grandmother said.

  ‘It’s not the end of the world,’ Declan said. ‘I just have one eye, but I can see fine. Does the left one look a bit funny?’

  ‘No, it looks Perfectly normal,’ Helen said.

  ‘Yeah, well I’m going back to bed to sleep on it. If I lose my nose or my mouth or one of my toes, I’ll let you all know.’

  ‘Have you taken all your pills?’ his mother asked.

  He stopped and looked at her.

  ‘You sound exactly like my mother,’ he said.

  ‘Is this serious?’ Lily asked Paul when Declan had left the room.

  ‘No, he’s right about it, it’s been coming for the last while. It’s the end of something, rather than the beginning. They’ll check the other eye more closely now, but they won’t be able to do that until next week.’

  ‘Should we not just let the doctor know?’ Lily asked.

  ‘On a Saturday morning? No, we should leave her alone.’

  ‘Oh, I got a terrible fright when he said it,’ his grandmother said. ‘It’s the one thing I dread. Your eyes are your most precious possessions. And Declan has the most beautiful eyes. His father, God rest him, had beautiful eyes as well. Lily used to go on and on to me about his eyes.’

  ‘Declan’s going to be buried with him now,’ Lily said.

  ‘I think Declan wants to be cremated,’ Larry said.

  ‘Oh, no one down here has ever been cremated,’ Mrs Devereux said.

  ‘Well, he says he wants to be cremated,’ Larry said.

  ‘No, he’ll be buried like all the rest of them,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘I wonder what put it into his head about cremation.’

  No one spoke until there was the sound of a door banging upstairs.

  ‘Oh God, listen to that! Oh God, listen!’ Mrs Devereux said, standing up.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mammy? What’s wrong?’ Lily asked.

  ‘You remember it well, Lily. My mother and my sister Statia were great believers in it. And that banging door just reminded me of it now. Two knocks would come to the door before someone in the family died. I heard it clearly the night before Statia died. And I woke your father and said we may get up now and drive into Bree because that’s the sign for Statia. I got it for my mother, God rest her, we all got it.’

  ‘Did you get it for my father?’ Helen asked.

  ‘No; I was just thinking, I didn’t. Ah, it’s part of the old ways, you’d hear no one talking about that any more, none of the neighbours. And there were other families like ours who had it too, a special warning that someone was dying. It was a gift, I suppose, but there’s no one believes in it any more. It’s died out.’

  ‘But you did believe it?’ Paul asked.

  ‘I did believe it,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘I do believe it. I know that I heard it when my mother was dying and I heard it when Statia was dying, but I haven’t heard it since, I don’t think. I don’t know what it is about now, but whatever it is, something like that wouldn’t have the same meaning. I don’t know what it is.’

  ‘And did you think the door banging upstairs was a sound like that?’ Helen asked.

  ‘It just reminded me of it, that’s all,’ Mrs Devereux said and walked over to the window and looked through the curtains.

  Helen noticed her mother saying nothing, seeming disturbed. She wanted to ask her if she too had heard this sound in the past, but decided not to.

  ‘One of the things about having children,’ her mother said as though she had not been listening to them, as though involved instead in another conversation, ‘is that you fear for them so much. I always felt with Declan that he wasn’t able for things. He’d wake easily and cry easily and he was afraid of school and he got sick easily. And when I saw him going anywhere on his own, I always felt that he needed more strength than he had, or someone to watch out for him. The feeling never left me. Helen was always leading the other kids around. You never had to worry about her. But Declan, I’ve never stopped worrying about him.’

  ‘He’ll sleep for a while, Lily,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘I don’t think he slept very well last night.’

  ‘Where does he stay in Dublin?’ Helen asked.

  ‘He stays with Larry, or with a friend of ours, Georgina, who has a big house,’ Paul said.

  ‘That’s something we could do, isn’t it, Mammy?’ Helen said. ‘We could find him his own place.’

  Her mother nodded distractedly; clearly she wanted to talk more about Declan as a child or wanted to avoid talking about the warning knocks to the door when someone was dying. Helen knew that she had raised the subject at the wrong time, and now it would be hard to raise it again.

  Declan slept for some of the morning and then woke complaining of a stomach pain. It had begun to drizzle outside as Helen and Larry changed the sheets and pillowcases for him; he sat and shivered in the chair in his room.

  ‘Declan, if you want us to get you an apartment or a small house in Dublin, just say it, say it in front of Mammy, and we’ll do it, we’ll get it this week.’

  ‘Thanks, Hellie,’ Declan said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  He sank back into the bed and moaned. The bruise around his nose seemed to grow darker every day. ‘Leave me,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and sleep again.’

  ‘No,’ Helen said; ‘you should try and stay awake so you can sleep tonight. Let us stay with you for a bit.’

  ‘OK, bossy-boots,’ he said, laughing, ‘but I might sleep.’

  Larry brought him the Irish Times and Declan leafed through it and then left it down. Larry sat at the bottom of the bed and told Declan and Helen all his plans for making the house more comfortable for their grandmother.

  As the afternoon went on, Declan began to go to the toilet at fifteen-minute intervals and came back looking drained. He still had the pain in his stomach, he said. Helen and Larry sat with him while Paul hovered in the room outside. The older women stayed in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s a funny thing about the eye,’ Declan said. ‘It’s a relief to have it all over. I used to see all sorts of floaters in front of it, but now I see nothing. That part is finished, anyway.’

  The others nodded. It was hard to think what to say in response. After a while, Helen went into the kitchen and left Paul to take her place.

  Her mother was in mid-sentence when Helen opened the door. She stopped, and put her cup down.

  ‘Say it to her,’ her grandmother said. ‘Say it out.’

  ‘Say what?’ Helen asked.

  ‘No, I was just saying, Helen,’ her mother said, ‘I would have loved a daughter who cared a lot about clothes and furnishings and colour schemes and all that. You know, when you came into my house the other day, I would have loved if you had made suggestions about colours or where to put things. I’d love if you had come into my bedroom and looked at my wardrobe and picked out some dress or suit that I never wear, or some jacket, and admired it.’

  ‘It’s a new daughter you need then,’ Helen said. ‘With all your money, why don’t you buy one?’

  ‘No, Helen, you’re being too hard,’ her grandmother said. ‘She was just saying that you don’t have a great interest in clothes.’

  ‘I’d love if you were the sort of daughter who’d come down and see me and take an interest in my house and my garden and my clothes,’ her mother said.

  ‘Your house is very nice,’ Helen said coldly.

  ‘Declan loved my garden and was full of ideas yesterday as to how to improve it,’ Lily said.

  ‘It’s a pity I’m not Declan,’ Helen said.

  ‘How is he?’
her grandmother asked.

  ‘He’s starting to get bad diarrhoea,’ Helen said.

  ‘God, the poor man,’ her grandmother said. ‘You know we should kneel down now and say a decade of the Rosary for him.’

  ‘You can leave me out of that, Granny, if you don’t mind,’ Helen said.

  ‘I’ll say the Rosary with you later, Mammy,’ Lily said.

  ‘Oh, I’ll pray on my own. I don’t know what’s got into the two of you.’

  ‘Mammy,’ Helen said, ‘I’d love if one of my sons was a really good musician – his father would love it too, but they’re not, neither of them, and we just have to live with them as they are. I suppose I wish one of them had been a girl, I’d like to have had a daughter, but I don’t think about it. I wish you’d been satisfied with me at some stage, even though I’m not what you wanted. I wish you’d stop wishing I was someone else.’

  ‘Helen, I’ve always accepted you,’ her mother said.

  ‘That’s a lovely word for it, thanks,’ Helen said.

  ‘Helen and Lily, stop the two of you and make up,’ Mrs Devereux said.

  Later in the afternoon when Paul came into the kitchen, he looked worried.

  ‘It’s very difficult to get rid of diarrhoea once it starts,’ he said. ‘He’s taken a few things to stop it, but they don’t seem to be having an effect.’

  ‘What should we do?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Hope it goes, but if it continues into tomorrow he’ll have to go back to St James’s.’

  ‘Is it something he ate?’ Mrs Devereux asked.

  ‘No; he’s had problems with his stomach for the last year,’ Paul said. He went out and the three women sat at the kitchen table.

  ‘He knows it all, that young man,’ Lily said.

  ‘I think he’s been through a lot more with Declan than we have,’ Helen said.

  ‘I don’t think there’s ever any substitute for your own family,’ Lily said.

  Helen wondered if everything her mother said was designed to irritate and provoke her.

  ‘Declan has been very lucky with his friends,’ Helen said.

  ‘And not so lucky with others,’ Lily said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Helen asked.

  ‘Well, there must be people who led him astray. I wonder where they are now.’

  ‘I don’t think he needed much leading,’ Helen said.

  ‘When Declan left my house, he was a young man anyone would be proud of,’ Lily said.

  ‘He was also gay,’ Helen said.

  ‘The two of you will have to be separated,’ Mrs Devereux said.

  ‘But isn’t it funny that his two friends are healthy and he’s sick? It’s easy for them being around him now,’ Lily said.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Helen said.

  ‘Your grandmother told me that one of them gave a very vulgar account of himself. He’s lucky I was in the other room. I would have run him out of here. And you all laughed and egged him on!’ Lily said.

  ‘Including Granny,’ Helen said.

  ‘Oh Helen, when I thought about it afterwards, I imagined your grandfather and things like that being said in this room,’ her grandmother said.

  Helen addressed her mother directly: ‘It was funny, and you weren’t here for it and you missed it and there’s no point in making moralistic comments about it.’

  ‘Listen to the teacher with her class,’ Lily said.

  ‘You’ll just have to learn to tolerate people,’ Helen said. ‘And it seems really odd to me that you can talk about what sort of daughter you’d like to have had in front of me.’

  ‘Would you rather that I did it behind your back?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Yes I would, actually,’ Helen said.

  ‘I just wish you’d take an interest in me and my life,’ Lily said.

  Helen noticed her mother’s face changing, as it had done in the car the previous evening. Suddenly, she seemed vulnerable, desolate, as though she were waiting for the one remark to which she would have no reply. Her eyes were filling with tears.

  ‘Mammy, I will do that,’ Helen said. ‘When all this is over, I will do that, but you’ll have to stop wishing I was somebody else.’

  ‘And I’d love to meet your children and Hugh,’ her mother said.

  ‘The younger one is a little terror,’ her grandmother said.

  ‘I’m sure they’d love you, Mammy,’ Helen said.

  ‘Oh would they, Helen? I don’t think they would.’ Lily began to cry. Mrs Devereux came and put her arm around her shoulder.

  ‘I’m sure they would, Mammy,’ Helen said again.

  Lily wiped her eyes and took out a mirror and began to reapply her eye make-up. Helen could see that she was getting ready to say something else. ‘The fact that you didn’t ask us to your wedding’, Lily began again, ‘is not nothing, not just something we missed for a few hours one day. We never saw you smiling and happy, having something you wanted, being with someone who loved you and who you loved. We never even saw photographs of it, if there were any photographs. And we never saw you with your babies. We missed all of that.’

  The crying and the sympathy, Helen saw, had given her mother strength and courage. She spoke as though she believed that no one would contradict her, or reply to her. Helen sat back and smiled before she spoke.

  ‘I didn’t want you at my wedding. It was important for me that you would not sponsor me, or take credit for me, when it had nothing to do with you. You had all my life to see me smiling and happy, and since you took no notice of me in private, I wasn’t going to have you make a big play of me in public. But I do agree with you that it’s not nothing.’

  ‘You’ve said enough to each other now,’ Mrs Devereux said. ‘Helen, I’ve never known a child who was as loved as you were by both your father and your mother, who was brought everywhere and given everything. They would come down here on a Sunday and their biggest boast would be that you had walked two steps, or said a word, or grown your teeth. I’ve never known a child who got as much attention as you.’

  ‘Sorry, Granny. I know Declan’s sick and it sounds petulant and spoiled to be complaining.’

  ‘What are you complaining about?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I’m complaining that you don’t love me the way I am, you want me to change. I’m complaining, actually, that you don’t like me.’

  ‘Helen, do you think if you had a problem that I would not drop everything to help you, to come to your assistance?’

  ‘But that’s not what I want from you. You’ve just invented a person in extreme need. I’m not that person, stop inventing me and projecting things on to me.’

  ‘You’re a very cold person, Helen,’ her mother said.

  ‘You can say anything about me and it will sound true,’ Helen said.

  ‘You know, after your father died, I could never get you close to me. I came home, and I noticed it first at the funeral that you wouldn’t meet my eyes. When we setded back in together, the three of us, you were distant, you gave me no affection, you never told me anything and you brought no friends home, there were no girls whispering or watching television together. It was you studying, or going to bed on time, or moving around the house like a ghost passing judgement on us all.’ Her mother’s eyes were sharp; her voice was full of contempt.

  ‘I never understood,’ Helen said, ‘how you could leave us down here for so long without visiting us when my father was sick.’

  ‘Is there a need to rake over everything?’ her grandmother asked.

  ‘You don’t know what happened to your father,’ Lily said, ‘how afraid he was, and how lonely and upset he was in the hospital even though I was there every day. I had no choice. Is that what’s been eating away at you all these years?’

  ‘Declan and I felt abandoned then, even though Granny and Grandad were nice to us, we felt abandoned, yes, if that’s what you want to know. Yes, and I suppose it’s true that it has been eating away at me all these years, as you
put it. I’m the one who took it to heart.’ Helen was almost crying now.

  ‘And carried it with you,’ her mother added.

  ‘I’ve never trusted you again, that’s all. And it’s not true to say that I was distant and you couldn’t get through to me. You were never on my side.’

  ‘I did what I could for you,’ her mother said, ‘and you never gave me an inch. Even I remember when your exam results came in, you just looked at them, you wouldn’t even smile. But that’s all long past now. I’d love to see you in your own house, to see if you’re any different there.’

  ‘I remember one of those summers,’ Helen said, ‘after I finished my degree and I was alone in that flat in Baggot Street. I had bought a book on cookery, and there was a brilliant vegetable shop around the corner just beside the Pembroke, everything fresh, and herbs and spices and even vegetables I’d never seen before. I used to go in there and over to Stephen’s Green, and I’d wake in the morning with the whole day to myself, to walk around in the sun, cook something, read the paper, read a book. I loved the area, the freedom, the quietness, and I thought to myself, If nothing ever happens to me like marriage or friendships, I’ll have achieved this. I’ll have got away. And I still feel that, and there’s no point in saying I don’t. I feel I got away.’

  ‘From what?’ her mother asked.

  ‘From you.’

  ‘What did I do to you?’ her mother asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but as you yourself put it about the wedding, it was not nothing.’

  ‘So why do you want your children to see me?’

  ‘Because we can’t go on like this.’

  Helen went to the window.

  Earlier her grandmother had made sandwiches, which were now piled up on a plate. She went towards Declan’s room to announce that sandwiches and soup were ready.

  Declan wanted two people to have their soup and sandwiches in his room. He did not want to be left alone. Helen and Larry joined him.

  ‘I’ve just been fighting with Mammy,’ Helen said.

  ‘One of the things I’ve noticed about the women in your family,’ Larry said, ‘is that they talk like they run things.’

  ‘They do run things,’ Declan said. ‘But you’ve never seen them with men. I mean real men, not wimps like us. When real men are around, they shut up and make tea.’