by Colm Toibin
‘That is pure nonsense,’ Helen said, laughing. ‘Mammy has never once shut up in her whole life and when Granny makes tea it’s a form of power play.’
As Declan went to the toilet, he told them to say nothing until he came back. He did not want to miss anything. Larry and Helen ate in silence.
When Declan came back, Larry resumed. ‘I mean that even if there were men around, I bet that wouldn’t change them very much. They’d still go on the same way.’
‘Fighting with each other,’ Declan said. ‘What were you fighting about?’
‘We were fighting about why she wasn’t invited to my wedding.’
‘Oh yeah, I’ve heard that one before all right,’ Declan said.
‘Your granny says that the two of you are exactly alike,’ Larry said.
‘That’s all rubbish,’ Helen said. ‘I’m not like her at all.’
In the hour Helen and Larry sat in the room with Declan, he went to the toilet five or six times and came back each time looking exhausted and dispirited, curling up in the bed and closing his eyes. The morning’s drizzle had cleared up now, although the ground was still wet. When she touched Declan, Helen knew that he had a temperature. The room, she thought, was too hot, the atmosphere too stuffy. She opened the window.
In the kitchen she told Paul that Declan was getting sicker.
‘At some stage,’ Paul said, ‘he’ll have to go back to the hospital, but nothing happens in hospitals at weekends, so there’s no real point in him going back until Monday.’
Helen looked at her mother, who looked away. She realised that her mother was not speaking to her.
Helen told them that she was going to walk alone to Ballyconnigar along the strand and then take the road to Blackwater, where she wanted Paul to collect her in an hour and a half. She went to her room to change her shoes and put on a pullover.
‘Maybe you’ll think about some of the things I said to you,’ her mother said when she came back into the kitchen.
Helen left without replying.
As she made her way down the rain-soaked edge of the cliff, she realised that at some point in the afternoon the opportunity had come and passed for her to put her arms around her mother, cry alongside her, forgive her everything, and promise to start a new relationship. She shuddered. Most people, she thought, would have been tempted, and would regret not having gone some way towards an enormous reconciliation. She shuddered again at the thought as she stepped on to the damp sand.
In all the talk about the past, there was one scene especially which haunted her, which remained strangely beyond her understanding. She could not tell her mother how that day when she came from Dublin with her husband’s body, and Helen met her in the foreground of the cathedral for the first time in months, her mother had seemed regal, remote, the last person a little girl would want to hug or seek comfort from. She watched her mother that evening as much as she watched the congregation or the coffin. She seemed totally transformed. Helen knew as she knelt there why Declan had been kept away; her mother could not have maintained this stance, this proud, public bearing, with a small boy clinging to her. An older girl could be kept at bay much more easily. Her granny could look after her, or her father’s sisters.
Helen remembered that the house that night was filled with people, with cups of tea and sandwiches being passed around, and more people arriving. She stayed close to her grandmother, and made sure that she and no one else was sleeping in her own bedroom. What she hated more than anything else was the familiarity people had with her; strangers knew her name, and, because her father had just died, impressed the idea on her that they were full of sympathy for her. They pointed at her and introduced her to people, and she wished, as soon as they arrived, that they would all go. Her mother held court.
Those days after her father’s death were dream-days, as though captured on badly processed film. And all the time, as her father’s body spent its first long days in the grave away from everyone who had loved him, her mother was at the centre of the strangeness, utterly placid, beautifully dressed, receiving people, talking calmly. Her daughter watched her from the bottom of the stairs, or caught a glimpse of her each time a door opened, thinking sullenly: When all these people go, you will just have me, but you don’t know that yet. And after a week or two, but especially when school term began, that was how it worked out. On nights when they did not go to Cush, and Declan went to bed, Helen sat by the fire relaxing, watching something on television in the half-hour before going upstairs. Her mother sat opposite her with no idea how to talk to her, how to treat her, none of the cosy companionship Helen had built up with her grandmother. Helen did nothing to help her; she turned the television off and stared into the fire and stretched. Without even trying, she was creating a barrier which would be hard now to break. Her mother smiled at her, asked if she was tired, and Helen nodded and packed her books for the next day, and yawned and went to her room, to her own realm, where she lay in bed and thought about the uneasy presence down below. Even then, she was dreaming about getting away.
She walked close to where the waves broke and withdrew and broke again. There was no one else on the strand. She wondered where the small stones came from that studded the shore between here and Ballyconnigar. Did they come from the land or the sea? Did they remain deeply embedded in the mud and marl that made up the face of the cliff? And then when the slice of cliff or big boulder of cliff fell, did the sea wash them clean and deposit them here?
She listened as a wave knocked them against each other like chattering teeth, and then retreated. In the time when they had come here after her father died, when all the funeral crowds and sandwich eaters had gone, and there was just Lily and Helen and Declan and their grandparents, Lily would sit at her mother’s kitchen table and innocently talk without stopping: all her woes, all her hopes would spill out. Helen could not listen to her; she had vivid memories of coming down here to this strand with the landscape slowly being eaten away and willing the sea to come more quickly towards them, taking the house and the fields, removing all trace of where her grandparents had lived. She imagined the sea, angry and inexorable, moving slowly towards the town, everything dissolving, slowly disappearing, the dead being washed out of their graves, houses crumbling and falling, cars being dragged out into the unruly ocean until there was nothing any more but this vast chaos.
She pictured her mother now, sitting at the kitchen table having more tea made for her. At some stage when she was a little girl, Helen thought, Lily had worked out a way of doing whatever pleased her, of liking and disliking people and things at will, and of always being supported. For years no one had argued with her, or asked her to stop, and for three days now she had been openly rude to Paul and Larry, clearly hostile to them. The first thing she would do when she got back, Helen thought, would be to shake her mother, force her to be polite to Paul and Larry, treat them like friends of Declan’s who had been there for him when no one else was. But thinking about changing Lily was stupid, Helen knew; no amount of shouting or shaming would make any difference. Her mother was best left alone, tolerated and kept at bay, because nothing now would change her or improve her. It was too late.
Helen inspected the ruins of the Keatings’ house. She stopped once more to look at the shreds of wallpaper and the floorboards and the half-rooms open to the wind and the sea. She wished that she could pray now for something – for Declan to be better, or for Declan not to be worse. But she realised as she walked through the car park and then up through the fields that she could not pray. She could only wish; and she fervently wished that what was coming could be delayed or stopped as she made her way along the road into the village.
It struck her as she walked along – still brooding over her mother – that the view of Lily she had been offered during the previous four or five days confirmed all her prejudices. It was that hopeless mixture of looking for sympathy and demanding attention; it was the ability to turn hot and cold, swamp you with affection
and then turn her back because she was busy. As Helen passed the limekiln she could picture her mother’s head over the crowd at the funeral, and she pictured her again now as she sat at the table in Cush, and Helen saw in both versions of her mother’s face a desolation and a helplessness, and, more than anything, a fear that would never leave her now.
Helen realised that she would never in her life experience that fear and desolation and helplessless she had seen in her mother’s face. Some time in the year around her father’s death, she had trained herself to be equal to things, whatever they would be. And this was what she was now resisting, something she had killed in herself, which in her mother was coming to the fore again, unadulterated and unashamed. All those early raw emotions which Helen had watched her mother direct at everyone but her, emotions which were flaunted in public and hardly used in private, these were now back at the kitchen table in Cush. And she was being asked to become friends with their owner.
Hugh would smile and say that she was taking things too hard. It would all mend, that was his view. He wanted her to see her mother and grandmother, but he would not accept that this would mean yielding something in her own nature. ‘Talk to her, that’s all you can do,’ he said.
They had been married for more than a year when Hugh’s father died. Helen had loved her father-in-law in the short time she had known him, and deeply regretted – she was pregnant with Cathal then – that her children would not know him. He had been a big, smiling, friendly man and he lay in an open coffin in the hallway of the house. The expression on his face was mild and satisfied. Helen’s mother-in-law sat close to the coffin, turning sometimes to look at him, or touch his face, as though to admire it or make sure that no great change was coming over it. And Hugh’s brothers and sisters wandered in and out of the hallway, stopping for a while to touch the coffin or touch their father’s hand. All of them cried at various times, and all of them took turns to sit by the coffin while their father’s body lay there, lit only by candles, his skin waxen in the flickering light, his presence increasingly shadowy and distant.
No one in Hugh’s family watched things as Helen did. She looked out for a niece or nephew or cousin or aunt or brother or sister who watched everything, who took everything in as though it were not happening to them. But there was no one like that except Helen herself at this funeral; they were all involved in being themselves, and this surprised her and impressed her. She wished she had been like that at her father’s funeral instead of watching everybody, instead of observing her mother as though she were someone she had never seen before. And she wondered, as she passed the ball-alley on her way into Blackwater, how different she would be now if she had spent those days after her father died openly grieving for him. Would she be happier now?
In the village she found Paul outside Etchingham’s pub. He was agitated.
‘I thought I should phone the hospital,’ he said, ‘but there was no one there I could talk to, so I phoned Louise at home, but she’s out. They’re expecting her back any minute but not for long, so I’ve got to keep trying. Your grandmother is going to have to get her mobile phone working, if only just for one or two nights.’
‘Is Declan really sick?’ Helen asked.
‘If he’s like this so early in the evening, there are real possibilities for serious diarrhoea and high temperatures and headaches in the middle of the night.’
‘Does he have a headache?’
‘He’s beginning one.’
‘And what’s his temperature?’
‘At the moment it’s a hundred and two, which is very high for so early in the evening, and he could be dehydrated too.’
‘And what could they do?’
‘If the headache got worse, there’s a slow-release morphine they could use, and there’s an injection they could give him, but you’d need a doctor to write the prescription or give the injection.’
‘You sound like a doctor,’ Helen said.
‘I’ve been through this with Declan a good few times, and I know Louise,’ Paul said.
After a while he got through to Louise. Helen watched him talking to her, knitting his brow and listening and then talking again. He hung up. ‘She’ll be back at ten o’clock,’ he said, ‘so if things are worse we’re to phone again. We’re to keep him cool. She’s worried about the diarrhoea and she knows how bad the headaches have been in the past. So we’ll call her at ten if we need to.’
They drove back to Cush in silence. As soon as they came into the house, they could hear voices in Declan’s room. Paul walked past Helen, sensing that something was wrong.
‘It’s all right. It’s nothing,’ Declan was saying as his mother and grandmother stood over the bed.
‘He’s had a bit of an accident,’ Larry said, having signalled Paul to leave the room with him. ‘I think there’s diarrhoea all over the bed and vomit as well.’
Paul went back into the bedroom. ‘It would be better if everyone left the room,’ he said. He turned to Mrs Devereux. ‘Could you get fresh sheets?’ he asked her. He turned to Lily then and asked her to switch on the shower and make sure that it was hot enough. He asked Larry to get a basin of water and some soap. His tone was brusque, almost bossy. ‘Could we clear the room? It needs to be much less stuffy in here.’
When Lily did not move, he gestured to her to leave. ‘It really would be better if we had some privacy in here,’ he said.
‘Could I talk to you outside?’ she asked.
Helen followed them both to the kitchen.
‘Could we talk afterwards?’ Paul asked.
‘Don’t you dare speak to me in that tone!’ Lily shouted.
‘We’ll talk afterwards,’ Paul said calmly. ‘I have a job to do.’
He went back to Declan’s room, where Larry was waiting for him with a basin of water. Mrs Devereux had already brought the fresh sheets. Larry went upstairs to run the shower. Helen stood in the kitchen looking out of the window.
‘I don’t know who he thinks he is,’ her mother said.
Helen sighed.
Her grandmother came into the room and sat down. ‘We put all the sheets into a bucket outside. Paul said he’ll wash them once they’ve soaked for a while. Isn’t he very good?’
Helen felt that her grandmother was deliberately provoking her mother.
‘We could easily put them in the boot of my car and I’ll stick them in the washing machine when I go home,’ Lily said.
‘Well, it’s a pity you’re saying that now rather than doing it at the time,’ Mrs Devereux said.
Helen watched her mother brisde quietly at the table as Paul came into the room.
‘His headache is getting worse,’ Paul said. ‘Also, he needs to drink a lot if he doesn’t want to become dehydrated. I should have got him 7-Up when I was in the village.’
‘How dare you speak to me the way you spoke to me in there!’ Lily stood up and faced him. ‘I don’t know what you think your place is here.’
‘Look,’ Paul said, ‘I knew as soon as I came in that Declan felt humiliated and I decided that he needed privacy and I didn’t notice him saying that he wanted you all back in when you left.’
‘As far as we are concerned you have no business here,’ Lily said.
Helen sought to interrupt her, but Lily continued. ‘Maybe it’s time you and your friend thought of taking yourselves out of here.’
‘Like now, immediately?’ Paul asked patiendy. ‘Just because you want us to?’
‘As soon as you can, yes,’ Lily said.
‘And just because you want us to?’ Paul asked again.
‘Well, I do live here,’ Lily said.
‘No you don’t,’ Helen interrupted.
‘It is my mother’s house,’ Lily said.
‘Declan asked Larry and myself to come down here,’ Paul said. ‘We have, Larry more than me, the two of us have been looking after him during very difficult times when I didn’t notice his family around.’
‘We weren’t around b
ecause we were told nothing,’ Lily said.
‘I wonder why you were told nothing. Maybe you could ponder that, instead of getting in the way and making poindess arguments,’ Paul said.
Helen felt that he had gone too far, but he remained placid and in control, weighing each word he said.
‘I wasn’t in the way,’ Lily said.
‘Well, it looked like that to me,’ Paul replied.
‘I’m his mother!’ Lily shouted.
Paul shrugged. ‘He’s an adult and he has got a bad headache and he needs a drink and there’s no room for this sort of hysteria.’
‘So are you going to leave?’ Lily asked.
‘Listen, Mrs Breen,’ Paul said, ‘I’m here as long as Declan is here and you can take that as written in stone, and I’m here because he asked me to be here, and when he asked me to be here he used words and phrases and sentences about you which were not edifying and which I will not repeat. He is also concerned about you and loves you and wants your approval. He is also very sick. So stop feeling sorry for yourself Mrs Breen. Declan stays here, I stay here, Larry stays here. One of us goes, we all go, and if you don’t believe me, ask Declan.’
‘What do you mean, “not edifying”?’ Lily asked.
‘He’s nearly thirty years old and he’s afraid to tell you things, for God’s sake,’ Paul said. ‘I haven’t time for this. Larry, could the mobile phone be got working, could the battery be recharged?’
Lily began to cry and went upstairs. Helen left the room and went and sat on Declan’s bed.
‘What happened?’ Declan asked.
‘Mammy had a row with Paul,’ Helen said.
‘She shouldn’t have done that. He always wins rows, he always knows what you’re going to say next,’ Declan said. He put his hands over his eyes and winced. ‘The pain comes in waves,’ he said and got out of bed again to go to the toilet. ‘I’m feeling really sick again.’