by Colm Toibin
He stopped her. “I remember other things that happened here,” he said. “You abandoned me. I remember how I felt then. So how dare you talk about my relations like that? You have no right. The people who burnt this house down are long dead.”
“I’m going anyway in the morning,” she said. “What time is the train?”
“I don’t know,” he said and went over to the television to turn it on.
“Could you find out for me?” she raised her voice.
“It goes at twenty past eight,” he said and came back to sit down. “I’ll drive you there.”
“Good. You can wake me in the morning. I’ll have my things ready.”
“Will you not sit with us for a while?”
“And do what?” she said.
“And talk, perhaps,” he said and laughed to himself.
“I’m going to bed, Richard. I’ll see you in the morning.”
* * *
In the morning, she woke to a grey light as the dawn came. She dressed and walked down to the river to look at the early morning mist over the Slaney. It was as she had always remembered. When she went back into the house by the kitchen Richard was there.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”
“I thought you were a ghost,” he said.
“I am. That’s what I am, a ghost.”
“I was going to make breakfast before I woke you.”
“You must tell Deirdre I am sorry,” she said.
“I shall, I’ll tell her that.”
“I will write to her, maybe I will suggest we meet in Dublin.”
“I’m sure she’d love to meet you in Dublin.”
“Tell her that, will you?”
“I shall. I promise I’ll tell her that.”
“And I’ll think about what you said to me.”
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said it.”
“No, Richard. I’m pleased that you did. How little one considers other people.”
He drove her towards the town by the back road. There was no traffic.
“How wonderful it all is,” she said. “The hanging trees.”
“Are you glad you came?”
“Yes I am. I’m sorry. It’s so difficult.”
They drove along the Rectory Road and turned down to the station.
“We’re early,” he said. “We’ll wait in the car.”
“No, no. Please, leave me here. I want to be on my own,” she insisted and made as though to get out.
“Well, I’ll go in with you for a second.”
They walked into the station where a few people were already waiting.
“I must talk to you about money,” he said.
“Another time,” she replied.
“Why not now?”
“Because we don’t know one another well enough. The next time we meet we’ll talk about it.”
“I have some to give you now.”
“Don’t give me any now.”
“When will we see you again?”
“I will write. You go now and I’ll see you soon. Give my love to Deirdre and Clare.”
* * *
He left her there in the grey morning to watch the Manse up on the hill; he now paid his dues to the priests who lived there. If Katherine’s father had ever imagined such a thing! Cold grey light of the morning in Enniscorthy, the Slaney running softly towards Wexford and the sea, the Dublin train moving past the river and the Ringwood and Davis’s Mills and then under the tunnel at the Model School to cross the bridge and arrive at the station where she was waiting.
THE SEA
The sea. A grey shine on the sea. Every morning Michael Graves left Katherine and walked into Blackwater to buy whatever food they needed and a newspaper. Katherine had not painted in a long while. Sometimes Michael’s comments irritated her but she paid no attention. Sea, sky, land. Connections. The port of Barcelona; the sea at Sitges in the bright grey early morning; the mud flats at Faro on a brilliant day, all shimmer and glare. And then this, this too. The dull grey light on the gun-metal sea at Ballyconnigar. Each colour a subtle variation of another: cream, silver, light blue, light green, dark grey.
Michael built her a windshield. Nothing was firm in this light. At first she worked in watercolours on small sheets of paper, using a crayon to make the lines. It was hard to paint how the waves separated from the sky, it was difficult not to give it too much definition.
“All my summers were spent in a hut when I was young.” Michael showed her the tiny wooden hut which his father had rented. “It was this spot here, this exact spot,” he pointed at the ground and made her look. “On the first Sunday in the summer of 1947 I knew I was for it. I knew for certain I was done for.” He searched her eyes again to make sure that she understood. “I spent two years in the sanitorium. I was lucky I didn’t die. The best of them died. Three or four in a family died.”
That summer Michael talked a lot about the past in Enniscorthy. Lives she knew nothing of, although she lived so few miles away: the poverty, the despair, the emigration. Some afternoons Michael met friends from his schooldays in Blackwater and did not return until the early hours of the morning. There was only one room in the hut and the bed was small; she disliked the smell of alcohol when he came in late, but otherwise she was happy to get on with her work and leave him to Blackwater and his friends.
She asked him to help her stretch a canvas, so big that she would have to leave it outside at night covered by plastic. He told her it was too ambitious, he told her to go easy, but she insisted. She would start with the grey Wexford light on a grey July day, with a certain pale yellow warmth. And work from memory with the canvas leaning against the side of the hut. She would make everything fade into itself, build the colours up carefully so there was a texture: the sea a vague shimmer of grey light.
He would get up in the early afternoon and come out with his shirt unbuttoned and look at what she was doing. He would tell her over and over that she was working on too large a scale. One day she turned to him and said: “Can we rent this place for another month?” He was going into the village and said he would try to arrange it.
“Can you watch one hour with me?” He grinned at her. He stood as though waiting for her. “I have no money,” he continued suddenly.
“I thought you had the gallery money,” she said.
“I spent it.”
“Don’t worry. I think I can give you some. But will you promise me something? Will you please?”
“What? What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to stop saying I’m working on too large a scale. I know I’m working on too large a scale.”
“So you want me to be the man who just helps to stretch the canvases.” He began to move away.
“Michael, where are you going?”
“I’m going into the village.”
“Do you have to go? What are you going to do there?”
“Ah, I’ll meet someone I know.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No.”
“You don’t want me to come? Why can’t I come?”
At first he didn’t answer and she asked again.
“We might meet people,” he said.
“And what’s wrong with that?”
“Think for a minute.”
“You don’t want them to meet me?”
“They come in with their wives. This is Ireland. It’s the country.”
“And I’m not your wife.”
“They all know that you’re here and who you are.”
“So why can’t we have a drink together?”
“Because they would be uncomfortable. They’re ordinary people I grew up with.”
“I think you mean you would be uncomfortable.”
She stood with her arms wrapped around her as though she were cold. There was silence between them for some time.
“Do you need some money?” she asked.
“Aye, Missus,” he sa
id.
“I’m in need of a few drinks myself, but since you won’t let me drink with your friends I’ll go on my own.”
“Go where?”
“Into the village.”
“When?”
“Whenever I feel like it, later on.”
“Come now then,” he said.
“Why don’t we walk to Curracloe,” she said. “I’ll have a swim on the way.”
“It’s too cold for bathing,” he said.
“We can have our tea in the hotel.”
“It’s a long walk.”
“It’s even longer when you’re sober,” she said.
“Why won’t you come to Blackwater?” he asked.
“You don’t want me to come.”
“We can go to Mrs. Davis’s, there’s never anybody there.”
“Michael has the landlord’s daughter but he keeps her in the hut,” she began to sing as though it were a rhyme. He looked at her and laughed.
“Let’s go to Curracloe,” he said.
She put her swimsuit and towel into a string carrier bag and asked him to help her cover the canvas with plastic before they went. Although it was still early afternoon a grey haze had come down over the sea and the fog horn was blaring.
“Tuskar lighthouse will start soon and go until morning,” he said. “The weather is going to get fine. There’s going to be a heatwave.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am, but it’ll only last a few days. In 1959 it lasted the whole summer. That summer I painted the hill up there behind the hut again and again and I sold every one of them.”
“You painted here as well?”
“As well as what?”
“As well as me?”
“They were as good anyway.”
“I never knew that you painted here,” she tried to keep him serious.
“I remember this first when the coast was out nearly another half mile. It gets eaten away every winter, that hill above Keating’s used to have a watchtower. It was a great hill to sit with a book.”
“Do you have any family around here?”
“No, not around here. In Enniscorthy. I’d introduce you only you won’t marry me.”
“I’m going for a swim,” she said, “you’ll have to come after me if you want to marry me.”
She changed into her bathing costume. Michael sat on the sand with his hands clasped around his knees and stared out to sea. He looked old and despondent. When she waded out she found the water even colder than she expected. She stood for a while shivering in the cold sea.
“Michael, it’s freezing,” she shouted back to him.
“Only a Protestant would go for a swim on a day like today.”
“Watch me Michael, watch me. One, two, three.” The first shock, then pleasure as she lay on her back and kicked hard in the freezing water.
When she came out of the sea he had the towel ready for her.
“Aren’t you the brave woman, aren’t you?”
“It’s lovely when you’re in the water. I wish you’d come in with me some day.”
“It’s thirty years since I’ve been in the sea.” They made their way past Flaherty’s Gap and Ballyvaloo.
“I could have stayed here all my life,” he said. “I could have been down here all the time,” he stopped and looked out to sea. They were nearing Ballineskar.
Something had loosened in him; he started to tell her about Brownswood sanitorium, about Enniscorthy, about Ballyconnigar, how when they got older they used to rent a place, a few of them, his brother, friends, fellow teachers. The others came and went but he always stayed the full two months.
“I read everything up there. Dickens, Shakespeare, George Eliot, Herman Melville. I’d go up on the hill and maybe just lie in the sun, and at night we’d sit around and talk or play cards. No one drank then.
“We always used to talk about the last day of summer when we’d have to pack up our stuff and go back to the town. We’d all go for a swim that day and stay in the water as long as we could. The first time I coughed blood I went straight in for a swim. Straight into the sea. I knew I was dying. I’ll never forget it. I must have stayed in an hour, thinking this would really be the last day. I tried to concentrate on it so I would never forget it.”
Suddenly, as they got near Curracloe, the flashes from the lighthouse began.
“There used to be another lighthouse,” he said. “The Blackwater Lightship, which flashed with a fainter light. I used to paint them in the twilight.”
“I’d love to see some of those paintings.”
“I’ll never paint down here again.”
He was morose, but she let him go on just as he had often listened to her.
“A few of them used to come on bicycles to visit me in Brownswood sanitorium. They always had such a look of doom as if they were sick and dying instead of me. I’d be upset for a whole day after they left. I used to go off for a walk, sometimes the nurses would let me go up to the top of the hill so I could see the Ringwood and the river. That’s how I started painting. I was getting worse that time. So one day, my brother asked me if there was anything I wanted and I said some paints and a bit of board.
“So they all clubbed in, about ten of them, my brother and some of the fellows and bought me a load of oil paints and brushes and an easel. It was like a farewell present and it was the only time I ever cried. Some in that ward still died even though the streptomycin became available soon afterwards. A lot of them had no faith in the cure.” He sat down and took off his shoes to shake the sand out.
As they walked on up the hill towards the hotel, it started to drizzle. The bar was empty except for one couple with their children. She gave him money to buy her a gin and tonic; he had a pint of Guinness.
“I remember how ill you looked when I met you first in Barcelona. Your skin was all yellow.”
He didn’t reply.
“Does being back in Ballyconnigar upset you?” she asked him.
“I don’t know. I suppose if you hadn’t been here I would never have come back.”
“Are you really sorry you left Ireland?”
“No, I’m not. I was just being sentimental about what it would be like if I hadn’t left. I used to hate it. I used to hate facing teaching every morning.” He spoke slowly, as though he found it difficult to find the words.
“How long did you teach?”
“I started in 1940 and I kept at it until I went into the sanitorium.”
“I was married in 1940,” she said.
“In Enniscorthy?”
“No, Tom wanted to go to Ferns Cathedral for some reason I can’t remember.”
“Are you ever sorry you left him?”
“No.”
“Are you going to visit your family often?”
“Yes, I am. Richard and Deirdre have said they’ll do up one of the outhouses for me. It’ll be private, away from them. You’ll be able to come and stay. They’re building a studio. I’m going to spend a lot of time with them.”
“They must like you.”
“My son likes me.”
“Do you like your son?”
“Yes,” she laughed, “yes, I didn’t think I would, but I do.”
“Is he like you?”
“No, he looks exactly like his father. Even when he was a child he used to look and behave exactly like his father.”
They talked for the rest of the afternoon until it was time for tea; every so often she would find that his mind had wandered—he was thinking again, brooding over the past. He wanted to sit near the window so he could see the lighthouse. Outside the drizzle continued.
“Do you know something?” he said. “I have always thought the social difference between us was the reason you could not marry me.”
“Social difference?”
She was puzzled by the importance he seemed to be giving this.
“Yes, where you’re from and where I’m from.”
“I thought other things w
ere in the way,” she said.
“Like what?” he asked.
“My being with Miguel when I met you. I have never recovered from what happened, you know that. By the way, social considerations don’t make any difference to me.”
“I think they make a difference to everything you do and say.”
“They make no difference to my relationship with you.”
“I think they do.”
“How, tell me how.”
“I don’t think you would ever marry a Catholic.”
“This is mad. It’s just loony talk. Let’s go.”
He said he wanted another drink.
“You turn nasty when you drink.”
“I want another drink. And you have the money.”
“If you’re drinking, I’m going to drink,” she said.
At closing time Michael asked the barman for a bottle of whiskey and some Guinness. Katherine wanted to try and find a car but it was too late and there were none.
By the time they reached the marsh at the bottom of the hill in Curracloe they were both wet.
“How are we going to find our way along the strand?” Katherine asked as soon as they felt the sand under their feet.
“Tuskar, the light of Tuskar,” Michael replied.
“Why don’t we go back and stay in the hotel for the night?”
“The walk to Ballyconnigar will do us good. Come on, the hotel’s probably booked out already.”
“It’ll take hours.”
“We’ll do it in an hour if we walk fast.”
They linked arms and tried to walk fast. Drops of water were dripping down the back of Katherine’s neck. A few times they found themselves at the edge of the sea.
“How far have we come?” she asked him.
“I think we should be getting near Ballyvaloo,” he said.
“Is this half way?”
He stood in the drizzle at the edge of the sea and held her against him. His breath sounded as though he were sobbing. She listened. At first she couldn’t make out what he said. Then he spoke again. “Don’t leave me destitute, sure you won’t?”
She reached for his hand and she held it hard as though she was trying to hurt him.
“No, I won’t. I promise I won’t.”
They walked on in silence.
“When we wake up,” Michael said, “it’ll be a fine blue day.”