Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  Margaret had been picking fights with Patrick all day, the pair of them cooped up in the house, winding each other up as the rain fell. Now she looked apprehensive, afraid – reasonably enough – that her mother was here to barge at her, to tell her off. But: ‘I just wanted a word,’ said Sarah with ceremonious formality, and Margaret’s expression changed to puzzlement. Not a telling off, then – but what?

  Sarah hardly ever entered her children’s rooms. Not to draw curtains, not to open windows, not to pick up laundry from the floor. ‘You do your own jobs,’ she told them, ‘and you bring your own clothes to be washed, or else they stay dirty.’ Ditto the air in their bedrooms, which stayed stale unless they bothered to open their windows themselves. She had enough to be doing; and she wouldn’t let Cassie shuffle around picking up after them either. (Martin, of course, wouldn’t think of it, not for a second.)

  And besides which, her children liked their rooms to themselves. They didn’t exactly stick Keep Out posters on their bedroom walls; they didn’t need to; the signals were unmistakable. They took after her – and yet now here she was, having made a trail through a swamp of clothing and paper and schoolbooks on the floor, here she was perched at the end of the bed in Margaret’s bedroom. From the living room, where Martin and Cassie sat at their ease, the murmur of the television.

  Margaret said, ‘What kind of a word?’

  And yes: what kind of a word? A word of absolution?

  But when it came to it, Sarah manufactured some question or other: how was school? – and how was homework? – and I was just checking that everything was coming along well enough, you know, what with O Levels on their way next year. Margaret looked puzzled, as well she might. ‘Everything’s fine,’ she said, after a considering pause, during which a helicopter could be heard passing overhead, skimming the treetops in the darkness, deafening. She waited for the din to fade, then spoke again. ‘You know I don’t like Physics, but even that’s going along, you know, well enough too.’ And then: good, Sarah said, that’s good, and she picked her way back through the clothes and books, and slipped out of the room, leaving something – a confused silence – behind.

  She remembered this episode now. Twenty-odd years ago now, she thought, more years than I can stand to think about – she remembered it as she sat on the edge of another bed. Of Patrick’s bed, this time, in this hospital, smoothing the sky-blue coverlet until he moved his index finger just enough to give her a sign, to indicate that he didn’t like her there, that she was annoying him, that she should sit in the chair by the bed – or get out. She was interfering with the bed’s level, with its equilibrium.

  ‘The nurse said you’re doing well enough today, considering.’

  Patrick opened one eye, and looked. Then closed it again.

  ‘Did she indeed?’

  And that was about the height of it.

  Of course they’d never had much to say to one another. She’d made sure of that. Had watched the two of them, her son and daughter, playing as children, fighting, tussling and wrestling – and talking. Had felt something like pale satisfaction that they were managing well enough, in spite of her.

  That, certainly.

  But something else too: a pulse of envy, of anger, that they could manage, that they had been able to reach out to each other, even though their own mother had long since given up doing anything of the sort. She had watched them: playing and fighting in the waves on warm days at the beach, until their father waded in to separate them; squabbling and playing in the garden together. Being normal. In spite of everything, being normal; or something that passed for it. A club of two, with Cassie in the wings.

  Now, she sat by Patrick’s bedside, watching him die. At our age, Sarah liked to say to her cronies, we reach a sort of equilibrium. We reach the top of whatever mountain we’ve been climbing: and now we’re on level ground, and we can look back at the view, and get our breath back. Can’t we? – and they would nod agreement.

  And now she sat in her chair by Patrick’s bedside, watching him die. Equilibrium and balance, in the face of all this. No: in the face of her whole life. It was hardly possible, was it? She pulled her woollen scarf a little closer. She could hear the subdued routine of hospital life continuing beyond the door – low voices, wheeling, a genteel rattle and clink of a trolley; and after a few minutes the bell began to toll in the school across the way.

  The next day – the day after she had perched on the end of Margaret’s bed – had it been the next day? Yes: and it was chilly but dry and she had the day off; so she loaded the car up with her restless children and with Cassie and set off to Inch Levels for a walk, for some air. Clambered up the leeward side of the sea wall, as she always did, grasping onto handfuls of the long grass that grew there – grey now, at the very end of winter – as she always did. And then she was up on top, on the level surface of the wall, and there was the sea before her and the slob lands, level and fertile behind her. The sound of a church bell drifted across the fields: the Angelus, tolling determinedly.

  She never tired of this place. Her mind drifted towards it during dull, irksome moments at work, at home: when she was totting sums and in the midst of paperwork; or chopping onions, browning mince in the pan, pouring off the fat; when she was sweeping, cleaning, ironing: when her mass of duties and jobs began to eat at her, she could step out of that life and into this one, all air and a great sweep of sky. Whatever the weather, there was space here and air to breathe. She stood still on top of the sea wall and looked out across the waters of the lough, grey and silver, the purple height of the island on the further shore, higher blue hills to east and west; and a mass of wintering geese in the fields, of wintering swans on the water. She thought – nothing, for a change; she looked and breathed, that was all.

  Below her was the narrow beach of shingle and white sand, built up gradually in the hundred years since the engineers designed this wall and the navvies constructed it: laboriously, as she imagined it, stone upon stone, until the sea was safely held back and they could relax a little. The new fields behind the wall began to drain, then, with rich black earth showing against the green of new grass. She knew all about this place: had read up about its history in the Central Library; had made a point of it. They built a railway line across this flat landscape, once they had secured it, running west and away into Donegal’s blue distance, and east towards Derry. The line had been taken up recently: nothing remained now but the level embankment, which was already being colonised by hazel and ash.

  Today, no movement. No other walkers, nobody but them to disturb the peace and space. Patrick and Margaret were already down there below, crunching along the narrow beach. ‘Bring a ball,’ she’d said, earlier, as they donned coats and scarves, ‘to kick’. Patrick didn’t want to come in the first place: the suggestion of a ball had gone down badly, very badly. He scowled at her, a scornful, hatefully adolescent look; when did he ever show any interest in a ball, any ball? Never, that’s when. He and Margaret went and waited in the car, then – and now there they were, walking slowly along the edge of the lough. Beachcombing, maybe, she thought: for a piece of driftwood, for shells, for something brought ashore by the waters of the lough that might hold some interest for a few moments. The shore was scattered with the quills of feathers, of a mass of swandown like a fall of snow.

  It was tremendous here: the big sky and salt air, the shingle shelving away gently into shallow water. ‘Why do you like it there?’ the ladies sometimes asked back in Derry – intrigued, disturbed, for people went to actual beaches, smooth Donegal beaches, for walks in this part of the world. They did not come to this sea wall, to these flat fields. The ladies were easily mollified for the most part: over tea and meringues in a booth at the Dolphin Café, Sarah mentioned the sea air, the blue hills and green fields. And the exercise, she added, walking on the flat. I walk and walk, she said, and she pressed the tines of her fork onto the meringue until it shattered.

  She liked its loneliness best –
though today, with this unaccustomed company, the loneliness of the place was hustled away. During the drive out here, Patrick had grizzled in the back seat, complaining of boredom. Cassie in the back too, silent. Margaret in the front: silent too, discombobulated – it must be – from the conversation in her bedroom the previous evening. The non-conversation. Leaning her head back, gazing out of the windscreen, playing with the matt-black toggle on her duffle coat, twisting its leather thread around and around. Removed, Sarah thought: looking not onto the worn colours of late winter, onto suburbs and industrial plants slipping past the windows, but at something else entirely.

  Her mother’s daughter.

  And beside her, Sarah drove in silence, her gloved hands gripping the wheel, her shoulders set.

  Though: what need for set shoulders, for these familiar defensive feelings? She ought to be capable of leaving the past in the past: at her age, she really should be able to do such a thing. It was a long time ago, she thought as she drove: and I was younger and more foolish too, without a shadow of a doubt; not much of a person, really. Cassie could bear witness to that. I was different then, she thought, and I am different now, and I don’t have to carry my past around with me like a millstone.

  Defensive of what? Nothing, so she thought and thought again: nothing, nothing. Night by night looking up at the flat, modern ceilings of the new suburban house, with Martin asleep and breathing almost silently beside her; day by day keeping her colleagues at bay, or walking on the sea wall here in the slob lands, or making her way from shop to shop in the city, lowering her eyes as she passed gun-toting soldiers in groups of six or eight, smiling mildly as she encountered an acquaintance here or there.

  Or, hardly a thing: only a history, a series of episodes foisted upon her; a story left behind like an unwanted parcel.

  ‘No, nothing,’ Cassie told her. ‘Nothing, nothing, nothing,’ shaking her head. Over and over: nothing, nothing, nothing.

  Why, then, had she made her way along the landing only last night, with Cassie and Martin parked in front of the television down the hall? Cassie’s knitting bag and knitting needles, Martin’s Radio Times. Why had she tapped gently on Margaret’s door and… and then the ridiculous conversation to do with Physics O Level, there in Margaret’s untidy bedroom, with a misty rain falling through the yellow light of the street lamp outside?

  Because. Because Margaret had just turned fifteen: would be leaving school in a few more years; would take off for somewhere else, for university, please God, grabbing the opportunities Sarah herself had lacked; and home and family would henceforth be for occasional weekends only. Margaret was growing up. She was surely old enough to have a portion of the family past filled in; and Sarah besides was aware of an urge, once more, to unburden herself, to seek a sort of – yes, of absolution.

  And now here she was standing atop the sea wall, and her silent son wandering the shingle strand below, and her daughter, silent too – but with a different kind of silence – watching him. And nothing said.

  Margaret must have picked up – she was hardly a lump of wood, after all – the distress in the room. But nothing was said. Sarah filled the room with distress, and filled Margaret with it too, likely enough, and then left; went along to the kitchen and made a cup of tea instead. Tea, she thought, would perk her up. It had, too. Now she looked down from the sea wall at her children, still trailing along the water’s edge. Patrick ought to be wearing his coat, she thought: there was no more rain for now in that grey sky – but it wasn’t warm. She watched her children for a moment: Patrick a lonely figure below on the stones, already long of limb and thin, gangly, awkward; Margaret nearby, standing looking at the sea.

  ‘They’re fine,’ Cassie said from below: she was shadowing Sarah from the gravel path, she was reading her mind. ‘It isn’t cold.’ Though her own hands were shoved deep into the pockets of her old coat – but now laboriously she too climbed up the grassy slope, hands clutching at the long, damp grass until she too was safely on the level. She took a breath of the air, a glance at the flat sea stretching below – and now they struck out in silence, the two women, leaving the two children behind on the shingle.

  It was Sarah’s usual walk, her usual beat – passing the humming pumping station and on, a mile or so, until the sea wall gave way to naturally rising ground, the lough on one side and the flat green fields on the other. Once she glanced back: there was Patrick on the edge of the water; there was Margaret on the shingle behind him: bent studying, looking for – for something, for seashells and white feathers.

  When Margaret was younger, she had passed through a spontaneous, outspoken phase: bursting in from school filled with the latest lessons, with new knowledge she had not possessed only the day before. Liberated from the humid embrace of her school gang – of Veronica and her group – she became for a short period a tomboy: given, as Martin said dramatically one evening at the kitchen sink, ‘to martial word and deed’. At thirteen, her class studied the Elizabethan wars in Ireland, the Battle of Kinsale: she was filled with enthusiasm for stories of doom and strategy, of powerful, clashing personalities, of Hugh O’Neill’s desperate march south through a frozen, wintry Ireland to succour the invading Spaniards at Kinsale, with a landscape left undefended behind him.

  ‘Powerful stuff,’ Martin said, listening with evident pleasure.

  ‘Then when O’Neill was gone, the English came and burned his lands,’ Margaret went on. ‘When he came back, everything was burned and broken.’

  ‘Burned and broken,’ Patrick repeated, the potatoes cooling on his plate. Cassie listened too, her fork suspended in the air.

  ‘And the crowning stone of the O’Neills smashed to bits by the English.’

  ‘How did they do that?’ Patrick asked, staring at her through saucer eyes.

  Margaret shrugged. It was unimportant, the how of it all. ‘Some special tool, I suppose.’

  Sarah was surprised by the energy, the glee over such material in a girl; and a little disturbed too, war being something that – as everyone was beginning to realise – could not be left to the pages of the history books. Still, she must encourage the reading, the interest: she knew her duty. She took Margaret to the library, and waited while her daughter browsed and then took her home again. But the girl must have caught something: something disturbed, like a ploughed field. Certainly this period had not lasted very long; she changed, practically in front of the family’s eyes, into a cautious, measured teenager; she began to hold her classmates at arm’s length; she had fewer friends. She allowed Patrick in, but nobody else.

  Became, in effect – yes: not unlike her mother.

  Well, thought Sarah, apples and trees. Though she tried to reason with herself: children did change, she said, all children change – it was nothing much to worry about. She was unconvinced, unconvincing. She didn’t convince herself and she didn’t convince Martin, who had thought he was at last getting in that tomboy Margaret a model of a daughter to whom he could relate. No chance. ‘Too much baggage in this family,’ he murmured one evening; and she took the point.

  What’s past is past: this was Sarah’s official mantra, even if she herself never had the means of putting it into practice. As an approach, it worked well enough: worked on the surface, worked if nobody asked too many questions. Certainly she never told her children much about her past – and nothing at all of substance. Born in Donegal; little by way of family there; met their father and married him: so much they knew. The barest bird-bones of a life, though enough to withstand a little incurious scrutiny.

  She had too the wherewithal, if necessary, to augment this skeleton with a few facts, some telling details: their marriage in Derry and, more or less straight after, a short honeymoon spent touring Ireland, the unpleasant crossing to Holyhead in the teeth of a late-summer storm; the resulting shocking seasickness; and the grime of the train to London. Later, the dismal first marital home in digs off a decaying Camberwell Grove; the dirt suspended in dull London skies. �
��The smell of gas in the air,’ she told them once, cannily, ‘and feeding the meter on cold nights to keep the place warm.’ Her children looked at their glowing coal fire, looked back at her, wrinkled their noses in distaste at a life they wanted nothing to do with and asked nothing more.

  Later still – by which stage her life was in any case slipping into the realm of the known, the verifiable – the removal from London back to Derry, where Cassie joined her once more. Children did not in any case tend to worry themselves about their parents’ previous life: and Sarah knew this too. Hers was a story threaded with illusion and opacity: like most people’s stories, it served – so long as nobody poked and dug and queried too much. Much better, she had imagined, to remain in a sort of continuing present tense.

  But later, as she watched her children grow – their past and present stretching long shadows into their future, pale sunshine and shadows – she was obliged to recalculate. And now, with Margaret fast approaching adulthood, the painstakingly created structure of Sarah’s own life was beginning minutely to fracture. Could there be repercussions? – for her, other people, for children? She watched her children set off for school in the early morning, their shadows running away from them; she saw them return in their usual state of disintegration, with uniforms and ties askew at the end of a long day. Patrick, she imagined, was fine: he was too young to notice much. But there was Margaret, about to step forward into her future, without having much of a past.

  Sarah fretted: her thoughts clung, unreasoning and indelible. And she was tired: the exhaustion and tension that came from the effort to keep part of one’s identity hidden permanently, permanently in shadow, like the far side of the moon. She held her children at arm’s length for so long now that her very limbs seemed set, like plaster of Paris. Too late, now, to think of flexing, of bending. Too, too late: she realised this as she sat on the end of Margaret’s bed. She could speak only to Cassie: and Cassie only shook and shook her head.