by Seamus Deane
At one point he stood up and switched it off and lit a John Player’s Navy Cut cigarette in the ensuing silence and smoked it until the untapped ash broke over his knuckles. Then he switched on again. It was the last round. Woodcock was being driven all over the ring. Then it was over.
‘Brave but stupid,’ he said, and went out first to the back yard and swept it, and then into the coal shed and broke the great shale pieces into black diamonds and gleaming ricochets, and hauled out tree blocks and broke them into gnarled sticks while the shed shook with the blows. I came out to look but he shooed me away without turning around. My mother shushed us all up to bed. When she put her finger to her lips, I knew I wasn’t imagining his sorrow, but I couldn’t fathom it. I lay awake all night and heard him go out in the morning at six. I crept to the lobby window and watched him cross the back lane and go down the New Road with his lunch bag in his hand. But it was no help. I could decipher nothing and was so tired at school that day that I fell asleep twice.
‘Shush,’ said Brother Collins, ‘we mustn’t talk too loud. We might waken him. Maybe we should croon a little lullaby. One, two, three.’
His face, when I opened my eyes, was a millimetre away, but I saw only my father. And the blows, when they came, shook in last night’s shed and were scarcely felt.
AFTER
July 1971
I told no one else, not even Liam, what I knew and hoped my mother would notice I was keeping a pact with her. But she seemed to pay no attention. What we both knew separated us. I grieved for her and for him. I grieved for myself. I was losing her. She kept her lips compressed, looking more severe, more like her father with his Roman stoniness, as the years passed. As with my father, I watched on the dates of the various anniversaries that I thought she must remember and mourn or celebrate in a year. The beginning and end of her relationship with McIlhenny, the death of Eddie, the birth of Maeve, the disappearance of McIlhenny, marrying my father, Una’s death, her mother’s, her father’s death, our births, Maeve’s marriage. While my father, ignorant of McIlhenny, had some of these things and perhaps the feud, his parents’ death, Ena’s death – they were more intertwined than he knew, more so than she had ever wanted. Perhaps they didn’t celebrate them; perhaps the only way they – especially she – could go on was by forgetting, forgetting. Katie stopped, like someone frozen in time; she pursued nothing any more, simply economised with what she had and greeted Maeve’s children, four of them, as they arrived, and saw the whole connection soften towards them and towards Marcus, until it seemed as though, on their infrequent visits, they had always been part of the extended family, still a little exotic but no longer beyond tolerance.
Was nothing ever said, in all those years afterwards, as we grew up, as their marriage mutated slowly around the secrets that she kept in a nucleus within herself and that he sensed, even though he also thought he was free of the one secret he knew, since he had told us, false as it was? I would watch them together as they aged. She was less haunted, it seemed, than before; he was still anxious with the air of someone whose anxiety was never focused. He knew something lay beyond him but he had no real wish to reach for it.
Maybe it was wise for him, for the whole marriage had been preserved by his not allowing the poison that had been released over all these years, as from a time-release capsule, to ever get to him in a lethal dose. I would have readily died rather than say anything to him, or insinuate anything before her, about that last big mistake that so filled the small place they lived in. Of course, Joe did not go to the IRA with his information about McIlhenny. He would not have known where to go. He went to my mother. I knew this without any doubt. It was as if she had told me outright. It was she who brought Joe to my grandfather and had Joe tell what he saw that night of the eighth of July 1926 when he saw McIlhenny get out of Burke’s police car in the small hours of the morning. That’s when Grandfather realised for sure the mistake he had made with Eddie. But even then, my mother didn’t know the full story of Eddie’s death – just that he had been executed in error. But not on her father’s orders. That she couldn’t have known, else she would not have been so upset that evening I was staying with her dying father and she had come down so distressed, saying Eddie’s name. What she knew was bad enough. McIlhenny, her sister’s husband, the man she had once loved – maybe still loved – and who had ditched her, was an informer. Now she was informing on him. But rather than sentencing him to death, perhaps she was the one who then went and told him his cover was blown, that he had better get out. And then she had married my father, closing herself in forever, haunted forever.
Her small figure at the turn of the stair; when I had left home, that was how I remembered her. Haunted, haunted. Now that everything had become specific, it was all the more insubstantial. How I had wanted to know what it was that plagued her, then to become the plague myself. There had been a time when, once a year, she placed a bet on the Aintree Grand National horse race. Having a wee flutter, she called it. Every year she backed the horse that was drawn number thirteen. One year, I placed the two-shilling bet for her and she won. I raced back to the bookmakers for her winnings and brought the money home to her. She took it and smiled and gave me a hug.
‘You have the luck for me,’ she had said.
That was a long time ago.
I felt it was almost a mercy when my mother suffered a stroke and lost the power of speech, just as the Troubles came in October 1968. I would look at her, sealed in her silence, and now she would smile slightly at me and very gently, almost imperceptibly, shake her head. I was to seal it all in too. Now we could love each other, at last, I imagined. Now we could have the luck for each other.
We choked on CS gas fired by the army, saw or heard the explosions, the gunfire, the riots moving in close with their scrambled noises of glass breaking, petrol-bomb flashings, isolated shouts turning to a prolonged baying and the drilled smashing of batons on riot shields. Now the television was on all the time, but she looked at it without watching it. We begged her not to stand at the window, where she did watch, when the army was firing or when the IRA was sniping. She was not deterred at all by any of this from her patrolling of the stairs, the lobby, the fireside, where a tile surround had replaced the old range and made the threshold of the fire naked and banal.
My father would sit with her at times, holding her hand, watching the television, both of them listening to the noise outside – shouts, occasional rifle fire, now and then the jump and boom of a bomb going off down town. They were on their own in the house by this time. Everyone had moved out, gone away, got married; but we visited them often. I used to wonder what it did to them, watching and listening to the war outside. Twice the house was searched and badly damaged by British soldiers; Eamon was arrested and released; Gerard was batoned by the police during a riot. All through this, my father remained as silent as my mother. I imagined that, in her silence, in the way she stroked his hand, smiled crookedly at him, let him brush her hair, bowing her head obediently for him, she had told him and won his understanding. I could believe now, as I never had when a child, that they were lovers.
And suddenly, just before retirement, he had a heart attack. He lost his pension because he had flaked out a year too early. Now, as the war in the neighbourhood intensified, they both sat there in their weakness, entrapped in the noise from outside and in the propaganda noise of the television inside.
I visited for a weekend, arriving on a Friday evening. It had been a bad week. Two days before, a British soldier, hunkering on the front doorstep, with his blackened face, had been shot dead by an IRA sniper during a street search. Hearing the thud, my father had struggled out of his armchair and opened the door a fraction. He saw the man lying there, his face up, his mouth open. He shut the door quickly and they both listened to the roaring of the other soldiers, the door being kicked, scatterings of shots. He was still shaken when I arrived; then, a couple of hours later, there was a knock on the door. I opened it to a man who hesitantly took off
his hat and asked if he could speak to someone in the house about the soldier who had been killed here on Wednesday. Before I could say anything, he added hastily that he was not army intelligence or police. He was the soldier’s father. I invited him in. He introduced himself to my parents, told them he was from Yorkshire, a miner, and that his son, George, had been shot, he was told, at our doorstep. He wondered if anyone had seen what had happened. There was a silence. My parents looked at him. He knew, the Yorkshireman said, he knew what people round here felt about the British soldiers. But this was his son. My father, who was struggling for breath these days, asked him if he wanted a cup of tea. I served it. My mother stared at him with the blankness that people who cannot speak can command.
Well, my father told the Englishman, his son had died instantly. He had heard the thud, not the shot. He had opened the door. The boy was lying there, looking quite peaceful. But he was dead, definitely dead.
‘So he didn’t suffer, didn’t speak?’ the miner asked.
No. They talked a little more, but there was not much to be said. The Englishman shook hands all round, we told him we were sorry for his trouble, he nodded, and left.
‘Poor man,’ said my father. ‘I feel for him. Even if his son was one of those. It’s a strange world.’
Not long after, a second heart attack killed my father in his sleep. My mother sat beside the coffin, dry-eyed, her hand on his folded hands, or on his brow; she would shiver slightly, as though at the cold of his body. He died the day a curfew was proclaimed by the army. The neighbourhood was closed between nine in the evening and nine the next morning while the street barricades were torn down. That night, I heard the armour coming in before I saw it from the upstairs window. The bulldozers came first, lifting and lowering their streaming jaws in the lamplight as they shunted the barricades aside. Behind them came the armoured personnel carriers, reconnoitring and stopping, nosing around the barricades and angling their seeing-lights down back lanes and side-streets. Other armoured trucks, with guns on top, with their yellow-and-white lights in front and their hard, high-pressure tyres, flashed their red-sashed sidelights and showed in their turnings glimpses of the avocado battle-dress of the soldiers who sat in facing rows within them.
I lay awake until dawn, when the noise of horse-hooves roused me to the window again. As though in a dream, I watched a young gypsy boy jog sedately through the scurf of debris astride a grey-mottled horse. Bareback, he held lightly to the horse’s mane and turned out of sight in the direction the army had taken hours before, although it was still curfew. The clip-clop of the hooves echoed in the still streets after he had disappeared.
I went down the stairs to make tea. In the hallway, I heard a sigh and looked back to the lobby window. There was no shadow there. It must be my mother in her sleep, sighing, perhaps, for my father. It was her last sleep of the old world. By nine o’clock, curfew would be over. That evening we would take my father to the cathedral that hung in the stair window and she would climb to her bedroom in silence, pausing at the turn of the stairs to stare out at the spire under which, for that night, before the darkened altar, he so innocently lay.
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Copyright © Seamus Deane 1996
Cover Illustration © Steve Doogan
Seamus Deane has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape in 1996
This edition reissued by Vintage in 2019
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781473573819