Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  They reached the end of the wall. There was the shallow sea, with terns and oystercatchers busy in the rich, muddy water. The slight breeze died away; and they stood still looking out onto the water, listening to the waves, the thin sound of water hissing between stones. On the far side of the water rose ruins, the gaunt outline of the castle. Wordlessly agreeing, they scrambled down the smooth seaward slope of the wall and sat on the beach. The stones were larger here, and smooth and polished: they fell away from their feet towards the water’s edge.

  ‘Just a beach,’ Cassie said suddenly; she slid a glance.

  A pause.

  ‘Yes.’ Sarah nodded at last. ‘Just a beach today.’

  *

  ‘Just a beach, this time,’ Cassie said. The stones were soft and smooth against her hands; the wind was gone. She glanced again at Sarah. All morning in the house, all through the silent drive out here to the slob lands, she had felt Sarah’s sadness. That was what it was: this is what it is, Cassie thought: the sadness of it, back again.

  It never went away. Not really: only for moments now and again, and then it picked it up once more. Again and again.

  Sarah, carrying it around with her all these years. So I must say something, Cassie thought: I have to say something. ‘Just a beach,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said. ‘Just a beach today. The best beaches are the ones with nobody on them, I think.’

  Cassie imagined about the children. Out of sight now, scrabbling and crunching on the shingle beach. The ground falling away from under them. And no need for it.

  Cassie braced and said: ‘Stop thinking about it.’ She felt, not for the first time, an impulse to reach for Sarah and embrace her, to clutch her hands and arms. But no: Sarah didn’t like to be touched: instead Cassie steadied herself there on the shingle, reaching her fingers into the stones as though to root herself to the ground. Enough to ask the question, to say something.

  Which was something they never did.

  She remembered the strangeness of the feeling the previous night, lying there in her bed in the darkness, with just a rind of yellow streetlight outlining the curtained window. She had imagined she was standing out there, on the silent suburban street, looking in on Sarah’s life unfolding on the other side of the window. It was like being at the cinema. The girl Sarah had been, long ago when Cassie first came to the farm, when she first saw her, with the grief of her mother’s loss across her pale face; the fields in which she grew up, the seashore and the white gateposts and long, hedge-lined driveway and smoky, white-washed farmhouse. And all that had come later: all this flicked through her mind in short sections, passing by the window, passing out there on the dark street – as though they were the newsreels, Cassie thought, from the old days in the cinema. Pictures of another life.

  Though – no: these stories gradually assumed a life of their own. No, a sound: birdsong in the fields drowned by the rasp of a low-flying plane above the waters of the lough, turning and banking in the way that she remembered; the rap of those heavy boots on the long driveway; the dry rattle of a poker raking out the ashes in the farmhouse, in the hearth, long ago; the deep sound of explosions at sea, trembling through the house, through the rocks; and the sound of the other explosion, this one a wall of noise as she crouched on hands and knees behind the rocks, her hands covering her head, her ears ringing. Sarah’s life, come alive. Cassie took her courage in her hands and said again, ‘Stop thinking and thinking.’

  *

  ‘I don’t,’ Sarah said.

  Which was untrue, of course. Of course, Sarah thought: of course I think about it all every day; about everything, about the unfolding of it. She knew her story was only a tiny element – an obscure one – in a larger story. And she understood that this knowledge did not much matter to her. She stayed centre-stage.

  So: yes.

  And also no: for hadn’t she managed successfully enough to shuffle this body of knowledge into a crevice in her mind? – it hadn’t even been all that difficult.

  ‘Plenty of people,’ Sarah said, ‘saw worse things than I did. They don’t talk much about it, but they still carry it all around in their heads.’ She looked back along the shingle: there were her children now, moving into view, along the edge of the water. ‘I do think about it,’ she said. ‘But I have, don’t I, to try to leave it all behind me? I don’t have the energy for all this.’

  All this concentration on the past and the present, she thought: is what I mean. Yet she was: concentrating on present and past; flooding her life with the past: the seawall crumbling. She could smell the danger of it – for them all, and for her children, most of all – she could smell it in her nostrils.

  And yet, there was nothing she could do. She was set fast in her course. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘we’ll go back to them.’ She got up from the sand with a little difficulty – feeling her age, feeling her weight – and watched thin Cassie get up too, with a sprightlier air: and they began their tramp again along the shelving shingle, back towards Patrick and Margaret. As they went, Sarah scanned the sand for driftwood to bring home – and she soon found a bleached branch, as beautifully smooth as if it had been lathed. She stooped, picked it up, running her hands the length of the cool white wood.

  ‘Martin will like this.’ Cassie nodded. ‘Come on – let’s be getting back.’

  Then Cassie said, ‘For the children.’

  For their sake, she meant: for the children. Stop thinking about it, if you can. What will become of you all, if you keep thinking about it?

  And Sarah had no answer to that.

  *

  Patrick crouched by the water’s edge. The shingle was crisp underfoot, the sea calm and almost motionless, with only tiny waves hissing through the sand and shingle. He suspended his hands in the icy water until he felt them begin to numb, his skin taking on a tint of blue. Then he sat back, stood up suddenly, shook his hands in the cool air until they dried. They were out of sight, almost, Cassie and his mother: they were out on the point, where the sea wall ended, with water in front of them and water to the right, and the island and the ruins of the castle ahead. As he watched, they vanished around the curve of the wall.

  ‘Come too, Patrick,’ his mother had said: held out her gloved hands; and then she took her gloves off and he watched her small white hands, reaching, stretching towards him. ‘Come too. Why don’t you come too?’

  Now he blinked and gazed along the sea wall. No: his mother would never do anything like that. She would never say that – at any rate, not to him. He picked up a smooth stone and skimmed it across the lough, and then another and another.

  And in a couple of years Margaret would be leaving home. ‘Years yet, Patrick,’ she laughed – a little while ago, when he first mentioned it. ‘Three years at least. Why are you worried about that now?’ But three years would come around soon enough: and there’d be nobody to talk to then. Only his father, who was always sick now; and his mother. His mother, who liked to keep herself to herself, who never took his hand, who kept her gloves on, always.

  There was a sudden commotion, out on the water. A swan, splashing and foaming through the water in a clap of wings: and now it took off into the air, its neck stretching ahead, and wheeled over the water and the flat fields and was gone.

  *

  ‘Come on, then,’ Sarah said. ‘Time to head for home.’

  Patrick looked up at her, his face a mingled expression of teenage sullenness and something else – a bleakness: she took a breath. Margaret had crunched on ahead, was now rushing, climbing the slope of the sea wall; and now Sarah looked at her son, moved by something, by a sudden concern – but most of all, by shame. ‘Alright there?’ she said. ‘Are you cold?’ But Patrick shook his head: it was too late. She clasped her hands together: he got up with noisy, grinding difficulty, and ignored her as he too crested the sea wall; and as she watched her two children vanished, disappearing over the edge. Cassie was silent. They were remote now, each from the other, the fo
ur them alone on a sea of sliding stones.

  Catch them up, Sarah thought, and suddenly it seemed to her that there was a choice here, that this was another moment where anything might be possible. A turning point, she thought: I only have to speak – and she took a deep breath of salty air and almost called out. Stop, right now: stop, stop and come back. I need to say something to you. But her son and daughter were gone: and the moment was gone; and now even Cassie had passed her, reaching the slope of the wall and clambering up to the crest – and now she too vanished.

  A turning point. A turning missed: Sarah recognised its familiar shape – and here was the very ground of Inch Levels shifting and trembling there under the soles of her shoes. Easier to say nothing, to keep her silence, her distance. Keep her past stamped back into a shadowy corner. Better for all their futures.

  She would do it for them.

  5

  ‘Who’s your favourite figure in history, sir?’

  The memory swam into Patrick’s head as he lay under the blue coverlet. Good days and bad days: and today, his body was pounded by pain. There was a refuge of sorts in memory, in the past; greedily he plunged in.

  Only last year, he thought: only a year and a bit ago. And yes: this question Patrick actually was asked, by one or other of his callow charges. And for a moment he was stumped for an answer. He rubbed his jaw – the spring of 1985: yes, the spring of last year, a warm afternoon, with summer and the end of his teaching year in sight, and the last class of the day, and the green lawns below the windows manicured and inviting and the heat building up in the little classroom under the eaves: a room filled with people waiting for the bell to ring. A helicopter racketed overhead, and after a few minutes another one: trouble, then, somewhere in town.

  The bell was a better sound. Clang, clang. Once every day it was a welcome sound, heralding as it did the end of school.

  ‘My favourite?’ Rubbing his jaw. ‘A teacher,’ he said, playing for time, ‘isn’t supposed to have favourites, Mr Porter, is he?’

  A rumble of reluctant appreciation, then young Porter again. ‘Seriously, sir.’

  ‘Ah, Mr Porter, this is too difficult a question on a hot afternoon. Ask me again tomorrow, when I’ve had time to think.’

  Spotty Mr Porter did ask – and Patrick had an answer ready. James Cook, Captain Cook, thricefold circumnavigator of the globe, interested not so much in exotica and cannibals and heathens and what have you, but in people. In what they liked and disliked, in what they ate and what kept them healthy, in what they wore and if they prayed and to whom – or Whom – and why.

  In what made people tick. He was a favourite.

  ‘Captain Cook,’ Patrick said. And another adolescent rumble around the classroom. Captain Cook was – English, wasn’t he? A sense of scandal in the air: Mr Jackson didn’t have to choose an Irishman – but did he have to choose an Englishman?

  Patrick explained. And maybe a few of them got it. Young Porter though, he didn’t approve, and he said so straight out. ‘Not an Irishman, sir, then? What about –’ … but Patrick cut him off there: no way, he thought, am I going to listen to some ream of Great Irish Heroes. Life is too short for that.

  ‘Well, Mr Porter,’ Patrick said. ‘What can I tell you? There are many figures in history,’ he said, ‘and amazingly, not all of them are Irish.’ Porter pursed his lips at that – a sarcastic teacher being universally disliked – and he kept them pursed as Patrick explained his reasons, his expression making it seem unlikely that he was taking much of this explanation on board.

  But yes: Captain Cook it was and Patrick explained why. Explained doggedly, even as he sensed the interest fading in the room. That was just too bad: Mr Porter had raised the issue, and now they would just have to see it through to a conclusion. Collective punishment.

  Captain Cook. Because he kept his mind open. Because he was a useful observer of the scene – no matter how bizarre that scene might have appeared. Because he was an explorer. Because he took people as he found them – an amazing feat in the middle of the eighteenth century, and still an amazing one in the twentieth. Patrick was aware of how just amazing it was: after all, he himself hadn’t kept his mind all that open, had he? And he himself was not so good at taking people as he found them. But he was still a pretty good observer of the scene – though he had already given up the idea of becoming an explorer.

  ‘An explorer?’

  His mother’s voice, shriller than was customary, high with disdain.

  ‘Well, we’ll see how you get on with that.’

  And true: he hadn’t done much exploration, even when the opportunities presented themselves. He was a dilettante, when it came right down to it.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ Margaret asked – later, weeks and months later, when the business was over and done with. ‘I want to see it for myself: I mean, the place.’

  He said, despairingly, ‘Why?’

  ‘I just want to,’ Margaret said, ‘but I can’t go on my own.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  She squared up to him. ‘You have to,’ she said, ‘because I can’t go on my own.’

  They went: quietly in the middle of the Christmas holidays, a raw, chill Wednesday afternoon when they could be fairly certain that there would be nobody else on the path, nobody else on the flat fields of Inch Levels or at the water’s edge. They parked the car and set out on the gravel path, crunching west towards the distant shore. To their left, water lay slicked across the landscape; the slope of the sea wall to their right was covered with grasses: dead, but still rippling and bending in the bitter wind; as they walked, the grass gave way to a low growth of leafless hazel. ‘This wasn’t growing here,’ Margaret murmured, ‘when we used to come here with the parents, was it? It seems changed.’

  Patrick slid a glance at her. ‘I’ll say it’s changed.’

  She looked away.

  ‘Did you tell Robert we were coming here?’

  She said, ‘What do you think?’

  They passed the pumping station, they reached the water’s edge. Stood, looked, scanned the grey water, and the crumbling outline of the castle which rose on the far shore. There were still bouquets being left here: three or four today, encased in plastic, several rotting, one still fresh. They weren’t the only ones, then, to walk out across the fields to this spot.

  He expected – what? A burst of tears, a flood of horrified emotion, regret, guilt? He hardly knew. He watched Margaret as she stood by the water’s edge and looked out across the lough; as she scanned the shingle at her feet; and as she looked up at the grey sky. Her expression was set.

  Then, they walked back to the car and drove home.

  And that was that. So much for exploration. Terrain, or the heart: Patrick stayed away from both, after such an experience.

  In any case, this ostensibly adventurous thread in his personality was too easily subsumed by daily life: so he told himself. By paperwork, class plans and administration; by rates bills and car tax – and now by cancer; each in its own way a highly efficient means of quelling the spirit of adventure. Any urge he actually did – honestly did – have to be in the thick of things: naturally, life took care of that. He saw where such urges led and he began to recast his dreams, his inclinations.

  Now, though, lying under his blue NHS coverlet, with an abundance of time to think, to consider and reconsider, Patrick was coming around to the idea that his spirit of adventure had always been a myth.

  ‘An explorer?’ Sarah scoffed – and there it was; perhaps she was right after all. He had always been comfortable with maps, charts, atlases, with pocket encyclopaediae of Flags of the World: more comfortable than actually going to any of these places.

  More desiccated, perhaps, that he had allowed: and now in his bed, he closed his eyes tightly.

  There was a postcard on the corkboard hanging on the wall to the left of the bed: a lurid affair, a cartoon map of a Greek island portrayed in blues and hot, mustard yellows. ‘Which island
is that?’ he had asked the nurse when it arrived in the post, peering at it (this was one of his bad days) through eyes that were yellow too.

  The nurse peered too. ‘It’s from – Jim, or John, or – I can’t really read it. Does a Jim or a John make sense?’

  ‘Which island is it?’ he asked again, sharply; and the nurse flashed a glance.

  ‘Zante, it says.’

  He knew Zante. He knew all the Greek islands: had set himself to learn them all, long ago: to learn all their names and all their little island capitals. In the same way as he had learned all the capitals of the world, all the flags of the world – long ago, to please his teachers, to please himself.

  More dry, yes: more desiccated than he had ever allowed.

  ‘Now where’s Zante?’ the nurse asked, thawing a little. And he was able to tell her. And later, to tell himself that he was nothing more than a Casaubon, comfortable with his lists and his reams and his charts. More comfortable than he would ever be with real life. He had walked the fields at Inch Levels that day with Margaret: that was all the real life he could stomach. No other examples were needed.

  Not an explorer, then. More like one of those pond-skating insects that stars, from time to time, in the less expensive natural history programmes.

  An inglorious demotion, he knew. But he also knew that it made more sense.

  They would glide around exploring their environment, these creatures: they were deft, they never punctured the surface of the water, they observed and regarded and absorbed. Their antennae were never idle. Human explorers saw more of their world, but a pond-skater saw everything.

  It experienced perfection.

  Easy to imagine himself as just such a creature.

  In the interests of balance, of course, he had been obliged – ‘I’m obliged,’ he told them – to give Mr Porter and his adolescent pals the other side of the story, there in the stuffy classroom under the eaves.